Our national parks are memory palaces where our personal histories reside.
Wilderness offers us a template to an enlightened citizenship. Instead of only caring for ourselves, we are invited to care for species other than our own.
Perhaps it is not so much what we learn that matters in these moments of awe and wonder, but what we feel in relationship to a world beyond ourselves, even beyond our own species.
Our rivers are shrinking. Our lands are blowing away. And our lawmakers from our president to our legislators, both federal and state, are in denial of the one hard fact: We must change our lives, our politics, our beliefs, our actions, if we are going to survive.
She loved the classics and believed in reading out loud.
Our fate like the fate of all species, is determined by chance, by circumstance, and by grace.
All we have is time.
To be numb to the world is another form of suicide.
Desert strategies are useful: In times of drought, pull your resources inward; when water is scarce, find moisture in seeds; to stay strong and supple, send a taproot down deep; run when required, hide when necessary; when hot go underground; do not fear darkness, it’s where one comes alive.
True eloquence has an edge, sharp and clean.
Perhaps this is what our national parks hold for us: stories, of who we have been and who we might become- a reminder that as human beings our histories harbor both darkness and light. To live in the United States of America and tell only one story, from one point of view, diminishes us all.
The time has come for acts of reverence and restraint on behalf of the Earth. We have arrived at the Hour of Land.
Artifacts are alive. Each has a voice. They remind us what it means to be human – that it is our nature to survive, to create works of beauty to be resourceful, to be attentive to the world we live in.
Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization, our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis of our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?
To acknowledge that which we cannot see, to give definition to that which we don’t know, to create divine order out of chaos, is the religious dance.
We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing. Neither does power. What is positive and what is negative is not absolute.
Mother had one quilt square made by a friend of hers framed, and hung it in her bathroom, where she saw it first thing in the morning. When I asked her why this mattered, she said, “It represents how women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.
We are slowly returning to the hour of land where our human presence can take a side step and respect the integrity of the place itself – paying attention to its own historical and ecological character beyond our needs and desires. This kind of generosity of spirit requires an uncommon humility to listen to the land first.
I would like to hear the words “public lands” spoken in every election debate, with candidates holding both government and corporations accountable in their oversight and use. The fact of more than three hundred million visits to our national parks last year tells me I am not alone.
Without manners, violence enters the room. Without the decency of imagination, narcissism leads.
We are bathed in light, endless light, sometimes volatile, ever changing. We watch weather as one watches fire.