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Words From the Land

Have a quotation from the land to share? Send it to storycircle@storycircle.org, and we'll add it to this collection.

• The earth is old. Nothing lasts. All life is kin. Different eyes perceive different worlds, and much remains hidden. Ours is an age of extinctions; ours are the hands of the destroyers. Grief and beauty are knotted together. Curiosity and imagination are fundamental human forces. So are fear and hatred, passion and compassion. None of this is surprising...
  ~SueEllen Campbell , "The World is a Nest" ~

• The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
  ~Rachel Carson ~

• We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one 'less traveled by'—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.
  ~Rachel Carson ~

• Blue sky. Bless me. Wall of rock. Bless me. Animal friends: Red Ant, Blue Heron, Bighorn Sheep, Chuckwalla. Bless me. Plant friends: Desert Willow, Brittlebush, Snakeweed. Bless me. This is your home. I am merely a visitor. Bless me, be gentle with me. Let me pass through your beauty, unharmed.
  ~Denise Chávez , "A Litany for Sentient Beings" ~

• Change is an easy panacea. It takes character to stay in one place and be happy there.
  ~Elizabeth Clarke Dunn ~

• If I were a place, I'd be Labrador: improbably, impossible, tempestuous, serene, thinly populated. I'd be smooth boulders carried by great rivers of ice, plopped down at random, and balanced precariously against the odds of gravity for thousands of miles. I'd be spired mountains, crumbling ridgelines, and winds that literally make the water smoke. I'd be purple sunsets, bedrock that looks like marshmallows, and relentless green waves beating against the shore....
  ~Jill Fredston ~

• a woman can't survive
  by her own breath
  alone
  she must know
  the voices of mountains
  ~Joy Harjo , "Fire" ~

• Facts carry the traveler only so far: at last he must penetrate the land by a different means, for to know a place in any real and lasting way is sooner or later to dream it. That's how we come to belong to it in the deepest sense.
  ~William Least Heat-Moon ~

• There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.
  ~Linda Hogan ~

• Out here we are poised on an edge between north and south, east and west. And there's something, a resiliency of the bones, a willingness to pick up and start again, a turning back to take another look at old habits, remedies that just might work the next time.
  ~Joan Shaddox Isom , "Out Here on This Edge, Terrain.Org, Issue No. 15, Fall/Winter 2004" ~

• We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.
  ~Barry Lopez ~

• While I often travel inside myself to find a room of my own, outside I can touch, I can taste, I can smell, I can hear, and I can see enough to fill my inner landscapes abundantly.
  ~Donna Marie Miller ~

• I should have felt a loneliness close to despair, there, in the night, in the rain, a thousand miles from home. What I felt instead was uncommon joy. What was there to long for, where all I wanted was what I suddenly had?—to be fully part of the night, joined by a song, by a simple shared song, to the loon, to the wolf, to the keening of all humankind, all of us together in this one infinite night, all of us floating in the same darkness, each of us, as we howl our loneliness, finding that we are not alone after all.
  ~Kathleen Dean Moore , "The Pine Island Paradox" ~

• Where am I? What wildness is this? This is a different chaos; here there are no edges. Skin against skin, I can find no boundaries.
  ~Linda Elizabeth Peterson , "Into the Escalante" ~

• ...I rise of earth and wind
  to the height of one woman
  and cup my breast to the hollow-gourd vine
  to feed the place that has sent me songs
  to grow from the ground that bears me...
  ~Wendy Rose , "Lost Copper" ~

• Holding my sherd, I feel the substance of time, a place I can travel to while standing still...This moment is a thousand years ago and a thousand years ago is this moment and we are both the same, that woman then and this woman now.
  ~Sharman Apt Russell , "When the Land was Young" ~

• I read the landscape to help me through, to know what's come before me there, to find my footing in time. The land can speak us back to ourselves, a kind of autobiography. To see it as mere scenery is like looking at the closed cover of a book.
  ~Deborah Tall , "From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place" ~

• Maybe we need different places for different phases of our lives. Maybe cherished places remain alive inside us even if we have to move on—our attachment to the earth not thinned, but widened.
  ~Deborah Tall , "From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place" ~

• We're lucky to find places that become the unalterable on the daily borders of our lives, places we can entrust with the loyalty of our gaze, imaginative territory into which the mind may safely stray and return to tell its tale.
  ~Deborah Tall , "From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place" ~

• I make a prayer for us.
  That we'll be singing like Inca doves,that we'll be watching swallows on a thermal flow,
  that we'll be the swallows eating dragonflies on the wing
  when the herd returns.
  ~Margo Tamez , "On the Wing" ~

• Liquid cold ripples, falls
  in frozen fingers on the moss.
  Canyon walls thread thin sky and stream
  to strands of azurite and silver.
  But where are the condors?
  ~Nancy Ellis Taylor , "Condor Country/New Year's Eve" ~

• As much as we live in a place, we live in place; we inhabit a condition of the soul. We live where we have made definitions, and in the process of making definitions, we create a place in which to live.
  ~Sallie Tisdale ~

• This paradoxical desert of water and sand, a place that dances in the wind and echoes with the throaty calls of sandhill cranes reminds me of what it is to love with a whole heart, to be at home, no matter who I am, where I was born, or how long I stay.
  ~Susan J. Tweit , "The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes" ~

• Sand still blows wild
  as mesquite, shadows prickle like cactus piercing
  the horizon and eyes still tear from the sun, but
  courage rooted deep here, gushed high and fierce here,
  and generosity still sprouts sudden as an occasional elm.
  ~Davi Walders , "Big Spring, Fifty Years After" ~