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The Magic And The Power

An Interview With Odetta

I’m shy about writing, about exposing myself, but songs have come through me. Once, I was in Israel and had a hard night — an argument that was so unimportant I don’t even remember what it was about — and I decided I’d go to sleep. In those days that was the way I handled my problems. There’s a Chinese proverb that says if you have a big problem, and you need to solve it, go to sleep. The problem won’t disappear, but you’ll wake up in another position. (Chuckles.) Well, I got back to the hotel, and I couldn’t go to sleep. So I took pencil and paper in hand and out came a song. The kind of writing I admire involves yourself right out there, like Joni Mitchell. Her songs are about what she did or didn’t do or what she’s feeling. It’s almost like an exorcism. But I haven’t gotten there yet.

A Thousand Years Later

Electricity came to Akcil six weeks before I did. There is only one way to reach the village — the hard way, by the road north to the precipitous edge of Turkey, and that is the road the new power line and I both took.

The Real Power

Don’t Blame Nature

An Interview With Frances Moore Lappé

There is no correlation between scarcity of resources, density of population, and hunger. Hunger exists where there is a small minority of people who control the resources and use them for their benefit.

Sunbeams

Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones. Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave.

William B1ake

Selling Out

When We Care

He is beautiful at that moment, because of work, because of absorption in some kind of work. He is doing something he cares about doing. He cares rather tremendously. I think most men I have thought beautiful as I looked at them have been so because they cared.

Sunbeams

The physical senses actually can be said to create the physical world, in that they force you to perceive an available field of energy in physical terms, and impose a highly specialized pattern upon this field of reality. Using the physical senses, you can perceive reality in no other way.

Seth in Jane Roberts’ Seth Speaks

Cold Steel

She could have been cast as a nun in an old Bing Crosby movie, the one who trailed the heroine and only came in on the chorus. Charlotte was a person who seemed to have no childhood, whom you could not imagine as younger than she was at the moment you met her.

The Doctor Who Won’t Charge

An Interview With Patch Adams

People are not their diseases. They are the same weak fragile beings that we ourselves are. Traditionally, a physician in general practice follows patients throughout their lives, but without touching on the quality of a person’s life, their loves, concerns, and fears, we ignore a gigantic area of resource and of disease.