I am a member of the Muskogee people. I'm a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I'm looking for answers of some sort or the other.
Joy HarjoRead
I believe in the sun. In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed and forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity.
Interpretation
The sun symbolizes hope and clarity amidst human flaws and challenges.
In this quote, Joy Harjo expresses a belief in the sun as a representation of hope and clarity. Despite the failures, fears, and greed that often cloud human experiences, the sun serves as a constant source of light and understanding, reminding individuals of the beauty and truth that can exist even in difficult times.
In practice
During a motivational speech about resilience, I quoted this line to illustrate the importance of hope in overcoming challenges.
I am a member of the Muskogee people. I'm a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I'm looking for answers of some sort or the other.
It's important as a writer to do my art well and do it in a way that is powerful and beautiful and meaningful, so that my work regenerates the people, certainly Indian people, and the earth and the sun. And in that way we all continue forever.
A story matrix connects all of us._x000D_ There are rules, processes, and circles of responsibility in this world. And the story begins exactly where it is supposed to begin. We cannot skip any part.
You just go where poetry is, whether it's in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there's live poetry or recordings.
Bottom line, I have to follow what my soul says, or my spirit. And my spirit said that poetry and the arts should be without borders, should be without political borders.
I don't like this romanticization of Indian people in which Indian people are looked at as spiritual saviors, as people who have always taken care of the land. We're human beings. But I think different cultures have developed different aspects of humanness.
Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.
It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
The poor are great! The poor are wonderful! The poor are very generous! They give us much more than what we give them.
Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas.
The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (“The Medusa”)
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