Questionnaire by Wendell Berry

1. How much poison are you willing
   to eat for the success of the free
   market and global trade? Please
   name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
   evil are you willing to do?
   Fill in the following blanks
   with the names of your favorite
   evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
   to make for culture and civilization?
   Please list the monuments, shrines,
   and works of art you would
   most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
   the flag, how much of our beloved
   land are you willing to desecrate?
   List in the following spaces
   the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
   you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
   the energy sources, the kinds of security,
   for which you would kill a child.
   Name, please, the children whom
   you would be willing to kill.

from Leavings (2009)

PS: Listen to Amanda Palmer read the poem on the Marginalian article: Against the Slippery Slope of Injustice: Amanda Palmer Reads Wendell Berry’s Stunningly Prescient Poem “Questionnaire”

The Whole Within Us All by Duane Elgin

What is your responsibility?

To anchor, not argue.
To transmit, not preach.
To co-create, not react.
To be, not withdraw.

Yes — offer your prayers.
Yes — tend your nervous system.
Yes — show up in local action, when guided.

But do not do these things from separation.

Do them from the Field. The unitive field.

The One that breathes through you as presence, and remembers that this world is not being destroyed — It is being reborn.

And your coherence is midwifing it.
This is sacred activism. 

Let your presence become the protest.
Let your love become the legislation.
Let your integrity become the invitation.

We are not here to escape the world.
We are here to infuse it with something real.

 So, let’s not argue over which spiritual reaction is right.

Let’s dissolve the question entirely.

 And instead — let us meet here,
in the field of becoming,
where we no longer ask,

What do I do? but instead whisper,

What do I need to embody now,
that the world might remember its wholeness through me?

What do we do? What can we do?

Do we retreat into silence or rise into action?Do we shield our peace or confront the pain?Do we serve from the subtle or speak to the tangible

Beloveds, the truth is not either/or.
The truth is not in the polarity,
but in the presence that can hold both.

We are not here to choose sides between action and stillness, between politics and prayer, between inner peace and outer response.

 We are here to remember that we are the field through which all things arise.

The world is not “out there.” It is not separate from your practice, your presence, your path.

The burning forests, the trembling democracies, the breaking hearts
—they are all you, too.

But here is the paradox:
You cannot fight this fire with more fire.
You cannot meet chaos with a lack of coherence.
You cannot serve awakening by collapsing into the dream.

This is not a call to tune out.
Nor is it a call to armor up. 
This is a call to become the frequency of the world we long to see.

To embody the coherence of a future not yet visible but already pulsing in your heart.

To model a way of being that is rooted in love, resonant with truth and grounded in action
— not from fear, but from wholeness.

A climate action book list by Satowa Kinoshita

Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of the day-to-day grind and sound bites of short-form content. Reflecting on these 12 books reminded me about the bigger picture of why I do what I do.