I think our lack of intimacy with the land has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other. What we perceive as non- human, outside of us, is actually in direct relationship with us.
There are two important days in a woman’s life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.
Abundance is a dance with reciprocity – what we can give, what we can share, and what we receive in the process.
Greed says there is never enough. Abundance says there is more than enough. Greed closes the door behind itself. Abundance opens the door for others.
To hold silence and to be silenced are two very different experiences. And so another theme emerges, that of light and shadow. When we share our voice, who benefits? When we withhold, who benefits? And what are the consequences and costs of both?
No separation between the spiritual and the physical. It is all one.
I worry, that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference.
To me, writing is about how we see. The writers I want to read teach me how to see-see the world differently. In my writing there is no separation between how I observe the world and how I write the world. We write through our eyes. We write through our body. We write out of what we know.
We forget the nature of true power. The power within is abundance. The power without is greed.
Every time we make love to a human being, fully, we are making love to everything that lives and breathes. In that sense it becomes communion. It is a sacrament.
I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient.
The question I’m constantly asking myself is: what are we afraid of? I think it’s important for us to follow that line of fear, because that is ultimately our line of growth.
If you take away all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.
What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?
I can’t imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn’t we?
There are things within the culture that absolutely enrage me, and for me it is sacred rage. But it’s not just peculiar to Mormonism – it’s any patriarchy that I think stops, thwarts, or denies our creativity.
I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, of even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.
I believe that when we are fully present, we not only live well, we live well for others.
What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.
The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.