Word by word, the language of women so often begins with a whisper.

I think Barack Obama has been a terrible disappointment environmentally. It's very sobering to realize, as a westerner, that under the Obama administration, we now have more active oil and gas leases on public lands than Americans ever did. Obama has been worse.

I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.

The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit.

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.

Grief dares us to love once more.

I think our lack of intimacy with the land has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other. What we perceive as non- human, outside of us, is actually in direct relationship with us.