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.

To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.

The act of civil disobedience is the act of taking our anger and turning it into sacred rage. It is a personal and collective gesture of resistance and insistance.

Well, we are Americans. I've always believed that you work with where you are - I am a Mormon woman who was raised on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in the American West in the United States of America. But, by the same token, much of my life has been spent resisting traditional forms of democracy, resisting traditional forms of orthodoxy, be it the United States government or the Mormon Church.

I would say I am at peace with the mystery of my mother's journals. Of course, I will always wonder, but isn't that the creative tension of living with uncertainty? By leaving me her empty journals, my mother has made herself very present.

When I said, "I am my mother, but I'm not," I was saying my path would be my own.

I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by water, through time.