I wonder how, among the Fremont, mothers and daughters shared their world. Did they walk side by side along the lake edge? What stories did they tell while weaving strips of bulrush into baskets? How did daughters bury their mothers and exercise their grief? What were the secret rituals of women? I feel certain they must have been tied to birds.

Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

The unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.

I will never be able to say what is in my heart because words fail us, because it is in our nature to protect, because there are times when what is public and what is private must be discerned.

Hope is not attached to outcomes but is a state of mind, as Vaclav Havel says, "an orientation of the spirit." And I have faith; maybe more than hope, I have faith. I think of my great-grandmother, Vilate Lee Romney, who came from good pioneer Mormon stock. She always said to us that faith without works is dead, so I think if we have hope, we must work to further that hope. Maybe that is the most important thing of all, to have our faith rooted in action.

I was extremely close with my mother and my grandmothers, we shared our lives - fully, honestly - and it was heightened as each succumbed to cancer. Little was hidden between us. No time. And what was hidden, turned inward. I made a vow to speak. Speak or die.

We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.