Society, like nature, is one body, really.

Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.

War starts in the mind, not in the body.

I know I am made from this earth, as my mother's hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth.

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.

Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.

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.