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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
“Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living. The soothing or afflictive effect of stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words, but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power — the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away.” — Omar El Akkad
“From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, … but nothing I did before the age of 70 was worthy of attention. At 73, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am 86, so that by 90 I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At 100, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at 130, 140, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.”— Katsushika Hokusai, also known as Gakyō Rōjin Manji (The Old Man Mad About Art)
“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilisatrice.” ― Edward W. Said
“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
