When I look in the mirror, I see a woman with secrets. When we don’t listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don’t, others will abandon us.

To slow down is to be taken into the soul of things.

For me, it always comes back to the land, respecting the land, the wildlife, the plants, the rivers, mountains, and deserts, the absolute essential bedrock of our lives. This is the source of where my power lies, the source of where all our power lies.

John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community. I think of my family stories-Mother's in particular-how much I need them now, how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds die with them. The same could be said of each passing whale.

Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.

We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins—it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of. In the night journeys of Canada geese, it is the silence that propels them. Thomas Merton writes, “Silence is the strength of our interior life.… If we fill our lives with silence, then we will live in hope.

I have spoken about what we can do as citizens, what we can do as a responsive citizenry, and this is where we have to shatter our complacency and become "active souls,"and be prepared to engage in aware - that personal struggle between our grief and our sorrow. But I don't think we have any choice.