"Listening to the earth awakens our primary belonging. Just as our capacity for attunement to people gets wired into us with the earliest connection to the eyes of the mother, our capacity for attunement to the land gets wired in the first time we truly open to her and feel her eyes on us; and it matures through commitment and consistency of relationship. Then we are no longer passing through territory. We are no longer tourists or exploiters. Some part of us must be given back each time we are present with her, because that attunement is now part of our own being."

"Untutored as I am in my own indigenous ground, still when I listen to the stories of the world around me each story opens into a larger story that ultimately links my consciousness to the story of the universe, the story of origins, the story of all beings. Everything opens up into its inter-being with everything else, thus promoting an indigenous and humble awakeness. It is awakeness to the intelligence and the authority of all things to speak for themselves, and an awakeness to our interdependence. That is why I consider it incumbent upon myself to enter into the landscape, to walk out into the woods every day I can, or into the marshes – into the communities of green and hopping life – not as a tourist, but to receive my marching papers, as it were. To ask to be restored to the Story that only they can tell me, and which they have been speaking since the beginning of memory....It is to appreciate and to acknowledge the living, conscious beings of nature as authoritative spokes-persons for the very mystery of being and creation – for the fluid dance of all life out of the unknown realm that is the endless growth and renewal of all things in the realm of earth, the microbial dance of nurture and decay, the life of our cells and of our own stories, and of our own capacity to see and hear and desire."

"Is this the allegiance I feel when I walk into the woods; that I felt long ago when I offered my life to the stream? It is a fundamental allegiance that often leaves me shaken and transfixed and obedient. I enter it as a realm of submission – neither to “my” story nor to the “absence” of story – but to the great story, always mysterious, unknown, ungraspable – but which grasps us and holds us suspended in its power – the power of tree, wind, and stream; the power of desert and rock; the power of the ant. It is the gaping doorway of the numinous in all manifest earth. And it is a family relationship that is primal."

"I am dumbfounded when I look at the depth of my own layers of rational, self-centered meanings – personal, scientific, philosophical – ratified by my culture and civilization, the depth of the layers of forgetting that distance me – that distance all of us – from what would otherwise be the most obvious and compelling reality: that everything is giving its life for us; that the life of our bodies and of our next breath derive from all these intelligent and generous forces of creation, heavenly and earthly, fire and water, that sustain this world; and that all the plant world and the animal world is continuously offering its life that we humans may be fed and sustained. If we were all so aware, our hearts would be constantly and ecstatically broken with the generosity and grief and beauty of all this sacrifice. And we would not be virtually numb to this debt and proceed as if life were our own clever show to succeed or fail at; or as if all of this immense life that feeds my life is just an unconscious, taken for granted, exploitable resource or mechanism for the wondrous, privileged free ride of being insatiably human, preoccupied with our personal needs, fantasies, and ambitions.

"Can that ever be other than a dangerous limb for a person or a civilization to walk out on – that limb that cuts itself off from its own tree of life? That leafs out and flowers for its own self-image and goals rather than for the life of the tree? Will that not always leave us somewhat desperate? The life of the Tree is the Great Story. It is the great story we have walked away from......And I suspect that this is what all true, or indigenously based, stories have ultimately to tell us – and we may learn it gently or we may learn it harshly: and that is that it is mutuality, not separate identity, that is the actual unit of

being; and that apart from that mutuality there is no sustainable balance or sanity."

"When in our human and civilized sleep, we forget, dishonor (and forget that we forget and dishonor), and even psychically dismember the integrity of the Goddess, or of the earth, we perpetuate an amnesia that allows the narcissistic accumulation of comforts, and the narcissistic manipulation of concepts – and hence the world – to take precedence in our awareness over our capacity to pay attention; and over the direct experience and celebration of interdependent reality, in which we might still have heard the earth speaking to us and remembered how to feed her."

"As we lose (or destroy) our connectedness to the earth, these self-centered meanings come to play out a long, separative, and forgetful psychic and cultural history upon the face of the planet, fueling, and fueled by, the unconscious momentum of our technological cleverness and our commercialism, of our power and greed. Amidst our sincerest human strivings we have managed to arrive at the endgame of a civilization that is founded on the unsustainable exploit- ation of the land, and which continues to flatten our consciousness to the full implications of our civilized assumptions of forever transforming the earth. .....For this reason I find it neither quaint nor regressive to be earth-rooted in our lives and in our spirituality."

"When the Buddha lay famished and dying, it was the dairymaid who gave him the sustenance to complete his path. When the Buddha awakened to the inherent perfection in all things, he called on the earth to bear witness. When he was gathered in assembly with a myriad of buddhas and bodhisattvas, the Lotus Sutra tells us, and wanted someone to bear witness to wisdom, he chose to call into the circle the young daughter of the Naga king. (The Nagas are serpent beings who govern the watery realm of the planet. It is they we offend with our pollution, obstruction, or depletion of the natural watercourse.) And it was this young girl’s awakened wisdom that astonished them all!"

"Our healing entails the re-integration of the poetry of our origins and the poetry of our connectedness to times before and beyond our own. It includes the remembrance of our origins in the land itself, and of our last ancestral intact relationship to it. And it includes remembrance of our origins in all the formative forces of creation and transformation that give rise to our existence and still ask our mindfulness and reciprocal engagement."

"In this day when all cultural, economic, and technological forces move us outward in endless diaspora from the sacred within our hearts, and the sacred beneath our feet, encouraging us to abandon the spiralic myths of the holy earth for the linear myths of the holy market, we are challenged to find not new fundamentalisms, but new ways of remembering and reasserting our integral sanity with the earth. New ways of outgrowing our compensations. New ways of planting our seeds and planting our feet. New ways of recognizing Her in Her sustaining gifts. New ways of singing our song back to the ground on which we stand. Even as we awaken our hearts to spacious being, to conscious loving presence, to the sacred freedom and responsibility of this moment."