participation...................

 

Rootedness is perhaps the most important and least know human spiritual need.  It is one of the hardest to define.  A human being is rooted through their real, active and natural participation in the life of a collectivity that keeps alive treasures of the past and has aspirations for the future. This participation is natural in that it sems automatically from place, birth, occupation and those around them.  Every human being needs to have multiple roots and to derive almost all their moral, intellectual and spiritual life from the environment to which they naturally belong.

-Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

Opening paragraphs..............

 

The concept of obligations takes precedence over that of rights, which are subordinate and relative to it.  A right is not effective on its own, but solely in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.  The successful fulfilment of a right comes not from the person who possesses it, but from others who recognize that they have an obligation towards that person.  The obligation takes effect once it is recognized.  If an obligation is not recognized by anyone, it loses nothing of the plentitude of its being.  But a right that is not recognized by anyone amounts to very little.

-Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

This should be interesting.

Rooted............

 

The questions all humans will eventually ask—Who am I?  Where do I come from?—are at least partially answered by the country they find themselves part of.  Our national community gives us roots; to quote Simone Weil again, 'to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul'.

-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

On the importance of..........................

 

..............................roots (and wings).

wild, nourishing nature..................

 

     If a plant is left too long in its grow-bag, its roots reaching the plastic will turn round and round and round, and finding no outlet into wild, nourishing nature, will, having nowhere else to go, re-enter the exhausted sour soil and, thriving till now, the plane, root and branch will begin to sicken.

     It would be foolish to suggest that Hebrew prophecy, Greek philosophy and science, Roman engineering and law are an exhausted sour soil, but it mightn't be at all foolish to suggest that they lack certain kinds of cultural nourishment that we now need.

-John Moriarty, Dreamtime

rooted..................

 The Enlightenment began with the rise of modern science, culminated in the French Revolution and then dwindled in wave after wave of yearning, hope and doubt.  It was characterized by a scepticism towards authority, a respect for reason, and an advocacy of individual freedom rather than divine command as the basis of moral and political order.  The Enlightenment expressed itself in many ways, according to national character and local conditions; but it owes its most celebrated definition to Kant who, in 1784, described it as 'the liberation of man from his self-imposed minority', adding that this minority lies 'not in lack of understanding, but in lack of determination and courage to use it without the assistance of another'.  By the time of Kant's words the Enlightenment was at its crisis.  Herder's advocacy of 'culture' against 'civilization' was in part a reaction to Kant's view of human nature, as formed from a single pattern and fulfilled in a single way—through reason, freedom and law. The 'universalism' advocated by Kant seemed to Herder to threaten all that is most precious in the human soul—namely, the local, the loyal and the rooted.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture