Despair shows us the limit of our imagination. Imaginations shared create collaboration, collaboration creates community, and community inspires social change.

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.

There are things within the culture that absolutely enrage me, and for me it is sacred rage. But it's not just peculiar to Mormonism - it's any patriarchy that I think stops, thwarts, or denies our creativity.

A friend of mine said to me not long ago, "Terry you are married to sorrow." I looked at him and said, "No, I am not married to sorrow, I just choose not to look away." To not avert our eyes to suffering is to trust the power of presence. Joy emerges through suffering. Suffering is a component of joy. Whether we are sitting with a loved one dying or witnessing dolphins side-by-side watching the oil burning in the Gulf of Mexico, to be present with the world is to be alive. I think of Rilke once again, "Beauty is the beginning of terror." We can breathe our way toward courage.

I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient.

When Pico [Iyer] talks about home being a place of isolation, I think he's right. But it's the paradox. I think that's why I so love Great Salt Lake. Every day when I look out at that lake, I think, "Ah, paradox" - a body of water than no one can drink. It's the liquid lie of the desert. But I think we have those paradoxes within us and certainly the whole idea of home is windswept with paradox.

I can tell that the Greater Yellowstone from the Tetons, to the Lamar Valley where wolves howl and grizzlies roam, acts as my spine, my range of memory that ties me to landscape of Other. And that the ocean from the rocky coast of Maine, to the Florida everglades, to the looming cliffs at Big Sur, sustain me, remind me we are nothing without salt water, wind, and waves.