Have We Come All This Way, I

If Stories Come To You, Care For Them. And Learn To Give Them Away Where They Are Needed. Sometimes A Person Needs A Story More Than Food To Stay Alive.

Over The Years, One Comes To Measure A Place, Too, Not Just For The Beauty It May Give, The Balminess Of Its Breezes, The Insouciance And Relaxation It Encourages, The Sublime Pleasures It Offers, But For What It Teaches. The Way In Which It Alters Our Perception Of The Human. It Is Not So Much That You Want To Return To Indifferent Or Difficult Places, But That You Want To Not Forget.

Conversations Are Efforts Toward Good Relations. They Are An Elementary Form Of Reciprocity. They Are The Exercise Of Our Love For Each Other. They Are The Enemies Of Our Loneliness, Our Doubt, Our Anxiety, Our Tendencies To Abdicate. To Continue To Be In Good Conversation Over Our Enormous And Terrifying Problems Is To Be Calling Out To Each Other In The Night. If We Attend With Imagination And Devotion To Our Conversations, We Will Find What We Need; And Someone Among Us Will Act—it Does Not Matter Whom—and We Will Survive.

For So Many Centuries, The Exchange Of Gifts Has Held Us Together. It Has Made It Possible To Bridge The Abyss Where Language Struggles.

You Can't Learn Anything From Saguaro Cactus, From Ocotillo. They Are Just Passing Through; Their Roots, Their Much Heralded Dormancy In The Dry Season, These Are Only Illusions Of Permanence. They Know Even Less Than You Do.