Once In His Life A Man Ought

They Have Assumed The Names And Gestures Of Their Enemies, But Have Held On To Their Own, Secret Souls; And In This There Is A Resistance And An Overcoming, A Long Outwaiting.

The Character Of The Landscape Changes From Hour To Hour, Day To Day, Season To Season. Nothing Of The Earth Can Be Taken For Granted; You Feel That Creation Is Going On In Your Sight. You See Things In The High Air That You Do Not See Farther Down In The Lowlands. In The High Country All Objects Bear Upon You, And You Touch Hard Upon The Earth. From My Home I Can See The Huge, Billowing Clouds; They Draw Close Upon Me And Merge With My Life.

To Encounter The Sacred Is To Be Alive At The Deepest Center Of Human Existence. Sacred Places Are The Truest Definitions Of The Earth; They Stand For The Earth Immediately And Forever; They Are Its Flags And Shields. If You Would Know The Earth For What It Really Is, Learn It Through Its Sacred Places. At Devil’s Tower Or Canyon De Chelly Or The Cahokia Mounds, You Touch The Pulse Of The Living Planet; You Feel Its Breath Upon You. You Become One With A Spirit That Pervades Geologic Time And Space.

My Line Of Vision Was Such That The Creature Filled The Moon Like A Fossil. It Had Gone There, I Thought, To Live And Die, For There, Of All Places, Was Its Small Definition Made Whole And Eternal

There Was Only The Dark Infinity In Which Nothing Was. And Something Happened. At The Distance Of A Star Something Happened, And Everything Began. The Word Did Not Come Into Being, But It Was. It Did Not Break Upon The Silence, But It Was Older Than The Silence And The Silence Was Made Of It.