To Put Your Hands In A River

Over The Years, One Comes To Measure A Place, Too, Not Just For The Beauty It May Give, The Balminess Of Its Breezes, The Insouciance And Relaxation It Encourages, The Sublime Pleasures It Offers, But For What It Teaches. The Way In Which It Alters Our Perception Of The Human. It Is Not So Much That You Want To Return To Indifferent Or Difficult Places, But That You Want To Not Forget.

Watching The Animals Come And Go, And Feeling The Land Swell Up To Meet Them And Then Feeling It Grow Still At Their Departure, I Came To Think Of The Migrations As Breath, As The Land Breathing. In Spring A Great Inhalation Of Light And Animals. The Long-bated Breath Of Summer. And An Exhalation That Propelled Them All South In The Fall.

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

For So Many Centuries, The Exchange Of Gifts Has Held Us Together. It Has Made It Possible To Bridge The Abyss Where Language Struggles.

Sometimes A Person Needs A Story More Than Food To Stay Alive.