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Rosie Whinray's avatar

Just after publishing this piece I came across a story in the Rebecca Solnit book I got from the op shop last week, The Faraway Nearby. She tells how in Myanmar monks and nuns publicly protested the military junta by "the rare and extraordinary rite known in Pali as patam nikkujjana kamma, the overturning of the alms bowl so that nothing can be put in it... Overturning the bowls banned the military and their families from giving alms, effectively excommunicating them... The monks marched through the streets holding their bowls upside down, a denunciation made scathingly public. To refuse to accept the gifts was to refuse to confer the reciprocal gifts, to break the threads that tied those secular people to monastic life and to the life of the spirit."

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Rosie Whinray's avatar

Sometime around 2019 I read an amazing, fearless essay by Catherine Ingram, titled Facing Extinction. She has since removed it from the Internet, but just now I found two quotes I had cached and then forgotten:

"You may find yourself in the company of people who seem to have no awareness of the consequences we face or who don’t want to know or who might have a momentary inkling but cannot bear to face it. You may find that people become angry if you steer the conversation in the direction of planetary crisis. You may sense that you are becoming a social pariah due to what you see, even when you don’t mention it, and you may feel lonely in the company of most people you know...

I once asked Leonard [Cohen] for his advice on how to talk with others about this. He replied: 'There are things we don’t tell the children.' It is helpful to realize that most people are not ready for this conversation. They may never be ready, just as some people die after a long illness, still in denial that death was at their doorstep. It is a mystery as to who can handle the truth of our situation and who runs from it as though their sanity depended on not seeing it."

And: "Courage is often confused with stoicism, the stiff upper lip, bravado that masks fear. There is another kind of courage. It is the courage to live with a broken heart, to face fear and allow vulnerability, and it is the courage to keep loving what you love 'even though the world is gone."

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