The Land Gets Inside Of Us; And

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.

We Cannot, Of Course, Save The World Because We Do Not Have Authority Over Its Parts. We Can Serve The World Though. That Is Everyone's Calling, To Lead A Life That Helps.

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.

The Writer Works On The Inside And The Critic Works On The Outside. I Don't Know What It Looks Like On The Outside, Sometimes. It's Not That I'm Not Interested-it's Not Where I Live. I Live Inside The Story.

To Put Your Hands In A River Is To Feel The Chords That Bind The Earth Together.