"Well, we are political beings. We live in the world; we live in the world of politics. The inner life isn't separate from that. What is the goal of the creativity one feels — and wishes to develop and help others to develop? Is it just to make more and more pots or take more and more pictures? Is that what it's all about? I don't think so. I think that as we become more creative, we move toward a concern with social justice and compassion. That's the natural movement. We come, maybe through times of loneliness, toward experiencing the reality of another person. As we create, you might say, we are created. We move toward a deepened awareness of reality. Outwardly, we move toward social justice; inwardly we move toward compassion.
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"Consider words: more and more I have come to understand that words are non-verbal. Try asking yourself where the words are before you speak them. I think we make a mistake in trying to restrict a word into something that we can read about in a dictionary. A word is a being. Writing becomes a more intimate and inspired activity when you see you're writing out of your substance, out of the mystery."
--- MC Richards, speaking to The Sun Magazine in 1989
MC (Mary Caroline) Richards was a writer, artist, and teacher. Her books include Centering In Pottery, Poetry, And The Person, The Crossing Point, and Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education In America. Richards was born in Idaho and raised in Portland. She studied at Reed College and the University of California at Berkeley, where she received her Ph.D. Richards taught at a number of places, but she is most famous for teaching at Black Mountain College starting in 1945. At Black Mountain, Richards taught writing and translated plays by Cocteau, Satie and Yeats. In 1954, she and other artists began a commune in New York called the Land, where she lived and created for ten years. According to her New York Times obituary, "Ms. Richards embraced old age with characteristic openness, writing a poem in 1997 in which she saw herself as ''living toward dying, blooming into invisibility.'' She died at age 83 in 1999.
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