I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.

It is a grief over the fate of the Earth that contains within it a joyful hope, that we might reclaim this Earth.

In my lifetime I have seen democracy begin to expand, not only to include those who have been excluded, but to provide a listening arena, a vocabulary, an intelligent reception for stories that have been buried. Not just stories of the disenfranchised and the marginalized, but marginalized and disenfranchised histories even in the lives of the accepted and the privileged.

To make love is to become like this infant again. We grope with our mouths toward the body of another being, whom we trust, who takes us in her arms. We rock together with this loved one. We move beyond speech. Our bodies move past all the controls we have learned. We cry out in ecstasy, in feeling. We are back in a natural world before culture tried to erase our experience of nature. In this world, to touch another is to express love; there is no idea apart from feeling, and no feeling which does not ring through our bodies and our souls at once.

What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed.

Society, like nature, is one body, really.

What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.