Tuesday 23 April 2013

What motivates your activism?

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 So many of the conversations that take place during Shake! planning and delivery engages with the discussion of what our motivations for activism are? Is there a space for ‘feelings’? Should we be motivated by love or anger? Do they even stand in opposition? If not, then how do we find the balance?

“So often activism is based on what we are
against, what we don’t like, what we don’t
want. And yet we manifest what we focus
on. And so we are manifesting yet ever
more of what we don’t want, what we
don’t like, what we want to change.
So for me, activism is about a spiritual
practice as a way of life.
And I realized I didn’t climb the tree
because I was angry at the corporations
and the government; I climbed the tree
because when I fell in love with
the redwoods, I fell in love with the world.
So it is my feeling of ‘connection’ that
drives me, instead of my anger and feelings
of being disconnected.”
-       Julia Butterfly Hill

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Frederick  Douglass 

What are your thoughts?


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