I Sometimes Think The Contemporary White American

Writing Engenders In Us Certain Attitudes Toward Language. It Encourages Us To Take Words For Granted. Writing Has Enabled Us To Store Vast Quantities Of Words Indefinitely. This Is Advantageous On The One Hand But Dangerous On The Other. The Result Is That We Have Developed A Kind Of False Security Where Language Is Concerned, And Our Sensitivity To Language Has Deteriorated. And We Have Become In Proportion Insensitive To Silence.

I Am Interested In The Way That We Look At A Given Landscape And Take Possession Of It In Our Blood And Brain. None Of Us Lives Apart From The Land Entirely; Such An Isolation Is Unimaginable. If We Are To Realize And Maintain Our Humanity, We Must Come To A Moral Comprehension Of Earth And Air As It Is Perceived In The Long Turn Of Seasons And Of Years.

Her Name Is Ago, And She Belonged To The Last Culture To Evolve In North America.

To Encounter The Sacred Is To Be Alive At The Deepest Center Of Human Existence. Sacred Places Are The Truest Definitions Of The Earth; They Stand For The Earth Immediately And Forever; They Are Its Flags And Shields. If You Would Know The Earth For What It Really Is, Learn It Through Its Sacred Places. At Devil’s Tower Or Canyon De Chelly Or The Cahokia Mounds, You Touch The Pulse Of The Living Planet; You Feel Its Breath Upon You. You Become One With A Spirit That Pervades Geologic Time And Space.

My Line Of Vision Was Such That The Creature Filled The Moon Like A Fossil. It Had Gone There, I Thought, To Live And Die, For There, Of All Places, Was Its Small Definition Made Whole And Eternal