Thoughts are one thing. Action is another. To bring about change what one small hopeful gesture will you take on behalf of what you love & care for?
Hello to you listening in Hamburg, Germany!
Coming to you from Whidbey Island, Washington this is Stories From Women Who Walk with 60 Seconds for Motivate Your Monday and your host, Diane Wyzga.
We are living in a time of historic upheaval. But what if this currently confusing, chaotic, confounding, cultural churn is stumbling toward change that reveals the hidden roots of social injustice for what they are so that we can reconfigure for good?
How easily the safeguards can be leaped. And they have been. We can clutch our pearls and bemoan the times we live in; or, we can invite our feelings of hopelessness to give way to action, to repair, restore, and renew out of the ashes of the old ways. We are responsible for making change because we’re the only “sentient force” that can.
Question: What one small grand gesture are you committed to take on behalf of what you love and care for?
These words from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney may motivate and sustain you wherever your feet touch the ground, whatever progress you are intent on making today.
“History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave...
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.” [“The Cure at Troy” Seamus Heaney]
BONUS: Seamus Heaney reads his poem, The Cure at Troy
The Cure at Troy (full text)
"Human beings suffer
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave…
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme. [From "The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes"]
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