A few opening comments....
Each year, for several years now, I've turned to tomdispatch.com to read the night before Christmas piece by Rebecca Solnit, whose quiet intelligence and grace -- and scathing unstoppable anger -- are always inspiring. There is a theme in Solnit's work -- hope. Not the sappy keep your head down and maybe things will get better kind of hope but a vision of hope that is hard work and trouble, lots of trouble.
Her most recent piece -- published Dec 22, 2011 on tomdispatch.com -- points forward by looking back, and as Tom Englehardt's introduction reminded me, this was the theme that remained hauntingly after her piece at the same time of year in 2010. Understanding and practicing peace starts with knowing the world around us, and knowing it honestly. Rebecca Solnit can help you do that.
So, here are couple of messages by Rebecca Solnit, from the frontlines of hope and despair...
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Occupy Your Heart - Dec 2011
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, A Shadow Government of Kindness Dec 2010
Some of Solnit's other work, her books, have challenged and encouraged me and still do. I suggest starting with A Field Guide to Getting Lost, but that is only a suggestion. There is much to find here:
- Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era
- Savage Dreams: A Journey Into the Landscape Wars of the American West
- A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland
- Wanderlust: A History of Walking
- Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism , co-authored and photographed by Susan Schwartzenberg
- As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art
- River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
- Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
- A Field Guide to Getting Lost - This book could change your life, by the way.
- Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers, with Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe
- After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, co-authored by Philip L. Fradkin, Mark Klett, and Michael Lundgren
- Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
- A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster
- The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle co-authored by David Solnit
- A California Bestiary with illustrations by Mona Caron
- Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
