The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.

People talk about medium. What is your medium? My medium as a writer has been dirt, clay, sand--what I could touch, hold, stand on, and stand for--Earth. My medium has been Earth. Earth in correspondence with my mind.

It is time for us to take off our masks, to step out from behind our personas - whatever they might be: educators, activists, biologists, geologists, writers, farmers, ranchers, and bureaucrats - and admit we are lovers, engaged in an erotics of place. Loving the land. Honoring its mysteries. Acknowledging, embracing the spirit of place - there is nothing more legitimate and there is nothing more true. That is why we are here. That is why we do what we do. There is nothing intellectual about it. We love the land. It is a primal affair.

Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out.

When you look at the Pueblo communities along the Rio Grande, when you talk to the Navajo people, the Ute people, and certainly the native peoples of California who still have their communities intact, it is what they have always known: that we are not apart from nature but a part of it.

Through revision, I enter the realm of the unspeakable and find the words that have eluded me.

That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about - the patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible