Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.

For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.

There's so much to be afraid of.

In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.

The cold view to take of our future is that we are therefore headed for extinction in a universe of impersonal chemical, physical, and biological laws. A more productive, certainly more engaging view, is that we have the intelligence to grasp what is happening, the composure not to be intimidated by its complexity, and the courage to take steps that may bear no fruit in our lifetimes.

The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard...be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.