Our national parks are memory palaces where our personal histories reside.
Words empower us, move us beyond our suffering and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.
I could walk forever with beauty. Our steps are not measured in miles but in the amount of time we are pulled forward by awe. This is another gift from our national parks, to be led by the vistas, to forget what nags us at home and remember what sustains us, the horizon.
To this day, my spiritual life is found inside the heart of the wild. I do not fear it, I court it. When I am away, I anticipate my return, needing to touch stone, rock, water, the trunks of trees, the sway of grasses, the barbs of a feather, the fur left behind by a shedding bison.
It is a day of angled light and flat-bottomed clouds floating in a turquoise sky.
Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.
We are a tribe of fractured individuals who can now only celebrate remnants of wildness.
The courage to continue before the face of despair is the recognition in those eyes of darkness we find our own night vision. Women blessed with death-eyes are fearless.
Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in a concert with another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought. A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us. Words fly out of our mouths like threatened birds. Once released, they may never return. If they do, they have chosen home and the bird-worms are calmed into an ars poetica.
Space is the twin sister of time. If we have open space then we have open time to breathe, to dream, to dare, to play, to pray to move freely, so freely, in a world our minds have forgotten, but our bodies remember.
I am of this place. Family is a place, and my family s located here, those who are living and those who have passed. I am am settled in the scent of sage, Mount Moran’s reflection at Oxbow Bend is more than a mirror of memories; it is the joy found in river otters, a reminder that there are places in the world we can return for peace unchanged.
I believe that spiritual resistance – the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions when everything around us asks us to concede, that our capacity to face the harsh measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river the rocks. There is a resonance of humility that has evolved with the earth. It is the best retrieved in solitude amidst the stillness of days in the desert.
My mother’s journals are a shadow play with mine. I am a woman wedded to words. Words cast a shadow. Without a shadow there is no depth. Without a shadow there is no substance. If we have no shadow, it means we are invisible. As long as I have a shadow, I am alive.
Our institutions and agencies are no longer working for us. It is time to reimagine the wilderness movement as a movement of direct action, time to reimagine our public lands as sanctuaries, refuges, and sacred lands. Time to rethink what is acceptable and what is not.
Wilderness is not a place of privilege, but rather a place of probity, where the evolutionary processes of life are free to continue.
Terry, to keep hoping for life in the midst of letting go is to rob me of the moment I am in.
This is a landscape that should not be sold.
In the dark of the moon there is growth. Plants do not flourish in the noonday sun, but rather in the privacy of the new moon.
I was not born here by my consciousness towards a land ethic was.
Today majesty is the length from where I stand to the summit of the mountain we are climbing. This mountain has majesty and hold its own authority above all others.