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.

The human heart is the first home of democracy.

The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.

There are two important days in a woman's life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.

These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.

I am a Mormon woman, I am not orthodox. It is the lens through which I see the world. I hear the Tabernacle Choir and it still makes me weep.

The mind creates those things that exist.