I resented my mother for guessing my innermost secrets. She was like God, everywhere at once knowing everything.

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.

The crocodile doesn't harm the bird that cleans his teeth for him. He eats the others but not that one.

We make art out of our loss.

Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.

A woman once described a friend of hers as being such a keen listener that even the trees leaned toward her, as if they were speaking their innermost secrets into her listening ears. Over the years I’ve envisioned that woman’s silence, a hearing full and open enough that the world told her its stories. The green leaves turned toward her, whispering tales of soft breezes and the murmurs of leaf against leaf.

There is a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples.