Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Women on the border often have a different take on immigration issues: more of a ‘tend and befriend’ approach, a kind of common sense, needle-to-fabric mend. The responses of women to the Migrant Quilt exhibit define the soft heart of what it means to be human.
If you think there is hope for a decent future — and I do — then make that future come alive for your family and friends. I ask only two things: that it shows a realistic future, and that it be fun.
What are the unhealthy stories that we tell now? The story of unlimited growth. The story that we are separate. Any number of stories about who we are and our place in the world, and what it means to be alive.
Because I am a literary writer, writing about climate justice, people often ask me, What is the importance of the arts in the climate struggle? I turn to Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth century German philosopher. “We have art in order not to die of the truth,” he wrote.
In a time of fall and fragmentation , if you are wise, you do not look for the powerful Ones with their faraway promises and angry rhetoric. What you find yourself searching for is something real, something coherent, something you can count on — your relationship with fabric of things, a certain meaning that comes from the natural world, held instinctively in the forms of creatures and plants.
I have been running POST PRESENT FUTURE for almost a decade. It’s a simple project where I invite people to write a letter to their future – anything they want as long as it’s to themselves – which they receive in the post five years later. It’s like an alternative post service – just with a five-year delay.
We’re in a systemic crisis. Because stories are not told well, and haven’t been told well by probably you and I at times, and certainly by the green movement, we’ve told some of the wrong stories, and that hasn’t helped people to engage with the biggest problems we’ve got.
Can the arts stimulate new ways of living in old mining communities like Doncaster? Aided by a small team of part-time staff and many volunteers, a regular print magazine, festivals, events, campaigns, meet-ups and exhibitions have all been spawned from Doncopolitan’s co-working space office on Copley Road.
Art can help us cope with the implications of our collective challenges. It can help prepare society for a possibly traumatic future. It can give voice to suffering and loss, helping people deal with life’s inevitable stress. And it can also offer beauty, which can be especially important in hard times.
I’ve spent my life living in rural America, some of it in blue state Vermont, some of it in red state upstate New York. They’re quite alike in many ways. And quite wonderful. It’s important that even in an urbanized and suburbanized country, we continue to take rural America seriously. And the thing that makes Vermont in particular so special, and I hope this book captures some of it, is the basic underlying civility of its political life. That’s rooted in the town meeting.
If your copy of our twelfth book has already landed, then you’ll know that we’ve shaken up the form of Dark Mountain in a whole lot of ways. Not least, where a typical issue would contain forty or more pieces ranging from short poems to longer essays or stories, this time around we have built the book around twelve longer texts – and having introduced the other elements of this issue, it seems like time to tell you a little more about these.
Our world is experiencing a dark wood that appears to stretch to the horizon and beyond. A dark wood in which there are no maps, because we have created a forest empty of the stories that connect us back to our deeper soul, to our natural ground, to our understanding that we are all connected. When we lose our stories we lose this common ground, that which holds us and grounds us in a sense of the whole.
