The Common Good

Ina May Gaskin’s insights into birth helped me a great deal.

“But while ‘job creators’ may be a new term, the adulation it expresses—and the contempt that it so clearly signals—are not. ‘Poor Americans are urged to hate themselves,’ Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five. And so, ‘they mock themselves and glorify their betters.’ Our most destructive lie, he added, ‘is that it is very easy for any American to make money.’ The lie goes on. The poor are lazy, stupid and evil. The rich are brilliant, courageous and good. They shower their beneficence upon the rest of us.”

“He grows plants that provide berries and seeds for songbirds, and many host foods for butterfly caterpillars, including milkweed, fennel and dill. He also selects plants that provide nectar for butterflies and hummingbirds.”

“Suddenly the absurdity of it hit me. Sure I am bucking the social norm by forgoing the career world and choosing to make a home and a family instead, thereby honoring the female in my own neo-feminist way. But in the end I am buying right back into the patriarchal paradigm by disregarding the humbling and dirty mama work for more glorious objectives…Because birthing and raising kids is commonplace does not mean it is anything less than absolutely extraordinary work.”

“Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation.”

“The term ‘imagination’ in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb ‘to imagine’ contains the full richness of the verb ‘to see.’ To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with ‘the mind’s eye.’ It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with ‘dreaming up.’ It does not depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned.

I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.”