It is a paradox in the contemporary world that in our desire for peace we must willingly give ourselves to struggle.
Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.
Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.
There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.
We make art out of our loss.
Poetry has its own laws speaking for the life of the planet. It is a language that wants to bring back together what the other words have torn apart.
The crocodile doesn’t harm the bird that cleans his teeth for him. He eats the others but not that one.
Mystery is part of each life, and maybe it is healthier to uphold it than to spend a lifetime in search of half-made answers.
Telling about our lives is important for those who come after as, for those who will see our experience as part of their own historical struggle.
There is a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples.
Let’s kneel down through all the worlds of the body like lovers. I know I am a tree and full of life and I know you, you are the flying one and will leave. But can’t we swallow the sweetness and can’t you sing in my arms and sleep in the human light of the sun and moon I have been drinking alone.
It has seemed so strange to me that the larger culture, with its own absence of spirit and lack of attachment for the land, respects these very things about Indian traditions, without adopting those respected ways themselves.
Sometimes there is a wellspring or river of something beautiful and possible in the tenderest sense that comes to and from the most broken of children, and I was one of these, and whatever is was, I can’t name, I can only thank. Perhaps it is the water of life that saves us, after all.
Poetry is a string of words that parades without a permit.
A spoken story is larger than one unheard, unsaid. In nearly all creation accounts, words or songs are how the world was created, the animals sung into existence.
Between earth and earth’s atmosphere, the amount of water remains constant; there is never a drop more, never a drop less. This is a story of circular infinity, of a planet birthing itself.
Death is dancing me ragged.
There is a language beyond human language, an elemental language, one that arises from the land itself.
We are full of bread and gas, getting fat on the outside while inside we grow thin.
I resented my mother for guessing my innermost secrets. She was like God, everywhere at once knowing everything.