Today I walked outside to sit in my backyard to continue reading a book I started earlier on this, my vacation week. Little did I realize how much some of the words I read today resonated with the events unfolding this week. For example, Margaret Fuller, whom I had not even known before reading Figuring wrote to her friend Waldo Emerson about her regard of the Italian revolution she was living in during 1848: My own country is at a present spoiled by prosperity, stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war . . . . In Europe, amid the teachings of adversity, a nobler spirit is struggling -- a spirit which cheers and animates mine. [The war she refers to is the Mexican-American War over the proposed annexation of Texas as U.S. slave state.] I couldn't help but languish in this prescient irony. Writer, Maria Popova, closes the chapter with this sentence: To be a revolutionary is to be in possession of an imagination capable of leaping across the frontier of the familiar to envision a new order in which what is gained eclipses the ill-servering comforts of what is lost. Things to think about has you go about your Utata Thursday Walk, tagging your photos with utata:project=tw737 and posting one small image in this thread. Project 366 (2020) | 4 June