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The following two passages explore themes of locating ourselves in perspective and finding strength and motivation in the moments we need it most. We’ll use them as a jumping off point to reflect on the beginnings of the year this Monday:<\/p>\n For the first time driving that day I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of space. Spinning on its axis but they say you don’t feel it, you can’t experience it. But to feel it is to be scared and happy at once and to know that nothing matters but that you do what you want to do and what you do you are. And I knew I was moving into the future. There is not PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or ever to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Oates, Joyce Carol. Zombie<\/i>. Vol. 7500. EP Dutton, 1995.<\/p>\n When you discover yourself lying on the ground, limp and unresisting, head in the dirt, and helpless, the earth seems to shift forward as a presence; hard, emphatic, not mere surface but a genuine force\u2014there is no other word for it but presence. To keep in motion is to keep in time and to be stopped, stilled, is to be abruptly out of time, in another time-dimension perhaps, an alien one, where human language has no resonance. Nothing to be said about it expresses it, nothing touches it, it\u2019s an absolute against which nothing human can be measured\u2026Moving through space and time by way of your own volition you inhabit an interior consciousness, a hallucinatory consciousness, it might be said, so long as breath, heartbeat, the body\u2019s autonomy hold; when motion is stopped you are jarred out of it. The interior is invaded by the exterior. The outside wants to come in, and only the self\u2019s fragile membrane prevents it.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n quoted in\u00a0Mabey, Richard. Nature cure<\/i>. Random House, 2011.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"joyce_carol_oates_by_marion_ettlinger_hires\"](\"https:\/\/chaplaincy.tufts.edu\/humanist\/files\/joyce_carol_oates_by_marion_ettlinger_hires-236x300.jpg\")
Joyce Carol Oates is an American author and poet who has written prolifically since 1963. In addition to winning the National Book Award for them<\/em> in 1969,\u00a0she was awarded the Humanist of the Year award by the American Humanist Association in 2007.<\/p>\n