Loneliness is an aspect of the land.

The first word gives origin to the second, the first and second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and so on. You cannot begin with the second word.

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.

I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.

To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.

We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.

The landscape of the American West has to be seen to believed and has to be believed to be seen.