Real Beauty Is So Deep You Have

The Land Urges Us To Come Around To An Understanding Of Ourselves.

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.

What Does It Mean To Grow Rich? Is It To Have Red-blooded Adventures And To Make A ‘fortune,’ Which Is What Brought The Whalers And Other Entrepreneurs North? Or Is It, Rather, To Have A Good Family Life And To Be Imbued With A Far-reaching And Intimate Knowledge Of One’s Homeland, Which Is What The Tununirmiut Told The Whalers At Pond’s Bay Wealth Was? Is It To Retain A Capacity For Awe And Astonishment In Our Lives, To Continue To Hunger After What Is Genuine And Worthy? Is It To Live At Moral Peace With The Universe?

One Must Live In The Middle Of Contradiction, Because If All Contradiction Were Eliminated At Once, Life Would Collapse. There Are Simply No Definitive Answers To Some Of The Great Pressing Questions. You Continue To Live Them Out Making Your Life A Worthy Expression Of Leaning Into The Light.

The Cold View To Take Of Our Future Is That We Are Therefore Headed For Extinction In A Universe Of Impersonal Chemical, Physical, And Biological Laws. A More Productive, Certainly More Engaging View, Is That We Have The Intelligence To Grasp What Is Happening, The Composure Not To Be Intimidated By Its Complexity, And The Courage To Take Steps That May Bear No Fruit In Our Lifetimes.