The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by the land as it is by genes.

The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.

Watching the animals come and go, and feeling the land swell up to meet them and then feeling it grow still at their departure, I came to think of the migrations as breath, as the land breathing. In spring a great inhalation of light and animals. The long-bated breath of summer. And an exhalation that propelled them all south in the fall.

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

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

We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.