There's So Much To Be

Conversations Are Efforts Toward Good Relations. They Are An Elementary Form Of Reciprocity. They Are The Exercise Of Our Love For Each Other. They Are The Enemies Of Our Loneliness, Our Doubt, Our Anxiety, Our Tendencies To Abdicate. To Continue To Be In Good Conversation Over Our Enormous And Terrifying Problems Is To Be Calling Out To Each Other In The Night. If We Attend With Imagination And Devotion To Our Conversations, We Will Find What We Need; And Someone Among Us Will Act—it Does Not Matter Whom—and We Will Survive.

Sometimes A Person Needs A Story More Than Food To Stay Alive.

Eden Is A Conversation. It Is The Conversation Of The Human With The Divine. And It Is The Reverberations Of That Conversation That Create A Sense Of Place. It Is Not A Thing, Eden, But A Pattern Of Relationships, Made Visible In Conversation. To Live In Eden Is To Live In The Midst Of Good Relations, Of Just Relations Scrupulously Attended To, Imaginatively Maintained Through Time. Altogether We Call This Beauty.

The Land Gets Inside Of Us; And We Must Decide One Way Or Another What This Means, What We Will Do About It.

If I Were To Offer Any Advice To Young Writers, It Would Be This: Be Discriminating And Be Discerning About The Work You Set For Yourself. That Done, Be The Untutored Traveler, The Eager Reader, The Enthusiastic Listener. Put What You Learn Together Carefully, And Then Write Thoughtfully, With Respect Both For The Reader And Your Sources.