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“If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks and gardens.” — Rebecca Solnit
During the slow winter months we gladly leave behind, we have been quietly busy preparing the ground for our new Rights Studio Garden. Now it’s time to reconnect.
Beyond just another metaphor, gardens hold so much symbolism: they offer us a way of understanding our work, our role, and our vision while also developing our ecological awareness.
As we wrote before, they are also a symbol of our inner life; an ideal we aspire to. As a physical space, a garden is a place we can get lost in, where we can slow down, contemplate, reflect, think, but it is also a place that requires care, patience, and hard work.
So we raked the soil, we cleaned, and weeded, we planted some seeds and now are ready to invite you to take a walk with us in our new garden — our digital space to make art and human rights grow, aka, our website.
As you wander, you will see that this is a work in progress and things will begin to bloom and mushroom in the weeks to come. We hope it better reflects who we are and what we do. May it be a place that entices you to contribute, or simply contemplate and be quietly curious. We hope you enjoy the view and the walk we start together.
Words, Veronica Yates
illustration, Miriam Sugranyes
Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit
The Overstory, Richard Powers
Wintering, The power of rest and retreat in difficult times, Katherine May
“The vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men, and that the faculty of action, which, after all, is the political faculty par excellence, can be actualized only as one of the many and manifold forces of human community.” — Hannah Arendt
“The act of engaging in free-improvisation will become a liberator, and emancipator, for many people to touch into their emotional lives in a non-verbal and non-judgemental way. We must introduce this healthy way of life.”— LaDonna Smith
"Politics in dark times such as those in which we live, cannot proceed without a counter imaginary: a passionate vision that rivals and defeats the moralized sadism of fascist passions and their phantasmatic landscape." — Judith Butler
“It’s not always easy to be comfortable in the space created by open questions. It’s tempting to hide in small rooms built from quick answers.”― Merlin Sheldrake
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move the opposite direction.”— E. F. Schumacher
