In Behaving Respectfully Toward All

One Of The Great Dreams Of Man Must Be To Find Some Place Between The Extremes Of Nature And Civilization Where It Is Possible To Live Without Regret.

No Culture Has Yet Solved The Dilemma Each Has Faced With The Growth Of A Conscious Mind: How To Live A Moral And Compassionate Existence When One Is Fully Aware Of The Blood, The Horror Inherent In All Life, When One Finds Darkness Not Only In One’s Own Culture But Within Oneself.

The Land Is Like Poetry: It Is Inexplicably Coherent, It Is Transcendent In Its Meaning, And It Has The Power To Elevate A Consideration Of Human Life.

When We Enter The Landscape To Learn Something, We Are Obligated, I Think, To Pay Attention Rather Than Constantly To Pose Questions. To Approach The Land As We Would A Person, By Opening An Intelligent Conversation. And To Stay In One Place, To Make Of That One, Long Observation A Fully Dilated Experience. We Will Always Be Rewarded If We Give The Land Credit For More Than We Imagine, And If We Imagine It As Being More Complex Even Than Language. In These Ways We Begin, I Think, To Find A Home, To Sense How To Fit A Place.

Would The Last Animal, Eating Garbage And Living On The Last Scrap Of Land, His Mate Dead, Would He Still Forgive You?