Chaos in a Fragmented World: Understanding it?

The more we try to shape our social justice, the more we see that there is no shape to it at all, that it encompasses everything, from inequality to advocacy. 

Mural in the streets of Memphis, Tennessee
© Ana M. Fores Tamayo

Vanessa Vaile from Precarious Faculty and I were discussing this the other day, and she sent me a list of all possible intersections. It is amazing -- when we think about this -- how all topics tie in together:

poverty, public education, workplace, immigration, refugees, globalization, austerity, discrimination, race, gender, religion, neo-colonialism, neo-liberal economics, consumption and consumerism ~ even sustainability and environmental issues because those too are driven by economic inequality and consumption.

So I am sharing with you here — as Vanessa shared with me — two lists of articles on social justice, poverty, and basic income. 

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness." 

Robert Frost

Yesterday, on August 1st, Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken had 100 birthdays. How many moments of joy multiplied have we enjoyed from "a homesickness, a lovesickness"? 

Looking at the night sky through a clearing in the woods
Somewhere in Pennsylvania, 2015
© Ana M. Fores Tamayo

I just returned from our own long cross country trip, and as my family camped out in a myriad of places across America, I kept thinking about our choices in life, about our "roads not taken", or the paths that we have chosen instead. 

So this trip reminded me that there is much to learn, always, in everything we do, in every journey, metaphorical or physical, intellectual or emotional. But the most important thing I have learned is that in every little change, we find ourselves evolving. 

If we flow with these changes, these alterations — just like the "lump in the throat" — it can become beauty, and thus, we can grow and transform into that diamond in the rough, that road "less traveled by, And that has made all the difference"! 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;