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21 " What is so dreadful is that to transform the traumatic we must re-enter it fully, and allow the full weight of grief to pass through our hearts. It is not possible to digest atrocity without tasting it first, without assessing on our tongues the full bitterness of it. "
― Aurora Levins Morales , Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity
22 " Milk Thistle teaches guerilla warfare. Adaptogen milagrosa, Milk Thistle works with what is here, the yellow layers of toxins, the charcoal grit, the green bile slow as crude oil pooling in the liver's reservoirs, waiting to learn to flow. Milk Thistle says take what you are and use it. She's a junkyard artist, crafting beauty out of the broken. She's a magician, melting scar tissue into silk. She's a miner, fingering greasy lumps of river clay for emeralds. She can enter the damaged cells of your life and recreate your liver from a memory of health. She can pass her hands over this torn and stained tapestry of memory and show us beauty, make the threads gleam with the promise of something precious gained. She will not flinch from anything you have done to keep yourself alive. Give it to me, she will say. I will make it into something new. She will show you your courage, hammered to a dappled sheen by use. She will remind you that you took yourself over and over to the edge of what you knew. She will remind you that the world placed limits on your powers. That you were not omnipotent. That some of the choices you made were not choices. Use what you are, she says again and again, insistent. You are every step of your journey, you are everything that has touched you, you are organic and unexpected. Use what you are. "
― Aurora Levins Morales , Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriquenas
23 " Metaphor is a kind of systems analysis, a different and equally valid approach to understanding complexity, as the mathematical modeling my father does. Metaphor constantly theorizes relationship and meaning. Artists do this work out of their own broad or narrow views, have their own parameters for sampling the data, their own biases about what goes with what, as do scientists. When I decide there is a poetic link between the behaviors of resurrection fern and historical memory, I am responding to a deep resonance inside of me, but that resonance is trained by a lifetime of studying the nature of resonances, of mapping the interconnected webs of human and wild communities. I have an informed feel for it. "
― Aurora Levins Morales
24 " But abuse is the local eruption of systemic oppression, and oppression the accumulation of millions of small systematic abuses. "