Linda Hogan (writer)

"But in reality I know that history is nothing more than the after shock of men’s fears and rages and the wars those two feelings create. It’s a tidal wave that swallows worlds whole and leaves nothing behind. (Chapter 6, p170)"

"Would it have been a different world if someone had believed our lives were as important as theory and gold? (Chapter 7, p179)"

"Mystery is part of each life, and maybe it is healthier to uphold it than to spend a lifetime in search of half-made answers. Still, as humans, we want truth. We are searchers. Our stories, our courthouses, our lives, contemporary anxieties and depressions are all searches full with this desire. Humans want truth the way water desires to be sea level and moves across the continent for the greater ocean. "Memory is a field full of psychological ruins," wrote French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. For some that may be true, but memory is also a field of healing that has the capacity to restore the world, not only for the one person who recollects, but for cultures as well. When a person says "I remember," all things are possible. (p 15)"

"there is a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples. (p 16)"

"We Indian people who had inhabited the land had not been meant to survive and yet we did, some of us, carrying the souls of our ancestors, and now they speak through us. It was this that saved my life. (p49)"

"Worlds are made of lies and dreams (p 200)"

"There is always, to everything, a before and after. (p 201)"

"I feel the air as if I could move through it with my ancestors' wings. (p 202)"

"We live not only inside a body but within a story as well, and our story resides in the land as sure as the vision of Dorothea Lange's desperate, running horse. (p 204)"

"We feel it, long for them, without even knowing what it is that we feel and yearn toward. We try to replace what is lost with possessions, with belief, with false hope. Longing, as poet Ernesto Cardenal said, for something beyond what we want. (p 204)"

"we are a story, each of us, a bundle of stories (p 205)"

"We are, in part, the body of earth (p 206)"

"Nowadays, it seems we are always trying to match the world to ourselves instead of ourselves to it, the way it truly is. Yet human smallness is only too apparent. In such great universes as ours, we should try to match ourselves to the outside world (p 206)"

"For Native peoples, our systems of knowledge are not about beliefs but about ways of knowing and how we know, through experience itself. It is not what is taught in books, not in ordinary classes, but what lies beneath all the new ideas."

"The anthropologists and those studying tribal peoples too often write their own interpretation of what is said because they are unable to see larger, to think beyond their own thinking enough to come to what is really spoken, meant, and known about the world. For indigenous peoples, each place has its own intelligence, its own stories."

"The physical space we all share may be the same, but the philosophical space isn't."

"Even when we have been sent away from that place or have not learned our own languages, we still have it; from subtle gesture and learned ways of being, it is passed down to us. This is "How It Is." The knowledge is in the manner of being, even when the words are not spoken. Our philosophies come of being from a place and a community, of knowing a place and respecting its boundaries."

"Most of us think of the earth as a living being and that we must live upon it with care and love and respect. The idea of subjugating the earth is the product of another mind. Even environmentalists, she maintains, are of another mind because they are not concerned so much with the sacred as with the idea of stewardship."

"We need to acknowledge the differences and their spectrum of human being, the significance of accepting all and not wishing for a monoculture. Diversity is a way of being, and the attempt to find an absolute is yet another part of the separate matrixes. Tribal peoples do not require a sameness of thought or belief. We come from different stories, different origins, and we respect the differences."

"Even today we focus on diversity as part of Earth's creativity while Euro Americans still search for the universal, an absolute, something that can be understood, spoken, be assimilated into their own system of knowledge. The Native understands the world as more complex and not the static that is implicit in an absolute where all communication remains within a narrow circle of like-minded. One group emphasizes the individual as part of the whole. The Euro emphasizes the individual. There is "we" and there is "I.""

"community lies beyond family within the surrounding, enfolding environment. We are co-creators in the universe, the world, within all the rest, all fluid, shifting movement, and without the emphasis on measurement. The world is there in its entirety, not in segments. And we inhabit it. This is what makes us human."

"Waking today just before winter when I try to name the color of grasses, how I feel their beauty, there is no word."

"even stars come apart in the play of universal wind."

"If, when you are there, you see women wading on the water and clouds in the valley, the smell of rain, or a lotus blossom rises out of round green leaves, remember there is always something besides our own misery."

"Even the land gives in to history. (from Prologue)"

"The infant Thomas W. Just was born on July 2, 1947, to much happiness and many pictures of his mother smiling down at him. It was the day just before the octopus left the water, walked on all eight legs across land and into Seal Cave. Sometimes young people made love in that cave. Sometimes boys escaped school and smoked cigarettes there. But on this day, the day after Thomas was born, the octopus walked out of the sea and they watched it..."

"During the daylight hours he travels, without wanting to, the inside passage of his own self, a human labyrinth of memory, history, and the people that came before him. [He] is in trouble, not with the law, not with other people, but within. What lonely creatures humans are when they thread through these passages. It is an inner world, one of disasters and whirlwinds, unknown islands, and he must journey them all alone. There are circles inside the mind of a man, circles a man can't escape because each time he comes to a conclusion, it is the same place and it begins over again. It courses hard. And [he] harbors too many secrets."

"Lies couldn't call out the way truth does. They feared discovery. They were constantly confused and had soft edges that overlapped. (p45)"

"lies are the first recognition of truth. (p45)"

"Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places. (p53)"

"The people her own age had not ever recovered from the war. The older people are still in the pain of history. (p64)"

""Why don't you go out more?" her mother always wanted to know. But she was out, just in another way. Out in the world. Out in the spray of ocean, the garden of heaven. Perhaps she was timid, but she preferred the world this way. There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn't for herself. It was for what had hap¬ pened in the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean. (p65)"

"She was an anchor but at least now she knew it had an end, a stopping place. It hit bottom. She could fall no deeper. (p76)"

"All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one. (p116)"

"He had a map. He looked at it, trying to figure out where he was. He'd studied the legend. Legend. It was a good word for kilometers and miles, things covering space. As if the world was merely a story, and it was, one story laid down over another. As it was in his older country, too. (p164)"

"[He] wanted to plant the seed. It was hope. It was a future. He wanted a future to grow in this place made so nearly desolate by bombs, craters and burned woods. (p165)"

"It is a still day, everything silent. Even the wind isn't blowing. There is just a breeze of something living, like the breath of the universe. (p281)"

"Like the water, the earth, the universe, a story is forever unfolding. It floods and erupts. It births new worlds. It is circular as our planet and fluid as the words of the first people who came out from the ocean or out of the cave or down from the sky. Or those who came from a garden where rivers meet and whose god was a tempter to their fall, planning it into their creation along with all the rest. (p288)"

"...most of the [European] theories made nature smaller than it is and made the human larger. Vision was about the seer only, not the seen. Nothing could be more different from how tribal people on all continents have seen the world. From the perspectives of those who have remained in their own terrain for thousands of years, there were - and are other points of view. For tribal thinkers, the outside world creates the human: we are dive to processes within and without the self. It is more humble way to view the world, and far more steady. Nature is the creator, not the created. There exists too, a geography of spirit that is tied to and comes from the larger geography of nature. It offers to humans the bounty and richness of the world. If we are open enough, strong enough to connect with the world, we become something greater than we are."

"Nature is now too often defined by people who are fragmented from the land. Such a world is seldom one that carries and creates the human spirit. Too rarely is it understood that the soul lies at all points of intersection between hum in consciousness and the rest of nature. Skin is hardly a container. Or boundaries are not solid, we are permeable, and even when we are solitary dreamers we are rooted in the soul outside."

"Soul loss is what happens as the world around us disappears...The cure for susto, soul sickness, is not in books. It is written in the bark of a tree, in the moonlit silence of night, in the bank of a river and the water's motion. The cure is outside ourselves."

"The inward may have been, all along, the wrong direction to seek. A person seems so little and small, and without is the river, the mountain, the forest of fern and tree, the desert with its lizards, the glacial meltings and freezings and movements of life. The cure for soul loss is in the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of sunlight, the waking human in a world infused with intelligence and spirit."

"let your roots grow outward meeting and intertwining with other roots of those all over the planet consciously connecting for the same reason of maintaining peace and compassion. Feel the strength and support we give to the planet while connected with intent. (p 203)"

"Nature is the most profound multimedia event that you will ever experience. Why not turn off your television and go witness the greatest show on Earth. (p 152)"

"When we learn to align our own energy with that of the Earth's, we will move forward effortlessly. When we slow down and allow our senses to open, great transformations occur. Living on the planet Earth becomes living in the Garden of Eden. (p 212)"

"Each morning when I step outside my door I walk into the Garden of Eden. "O Great Spirit, thank you for this beautiful day." There has not been one day in the past 20 years that I have not started my day this way and really meant it. When you are truly connected to Mother Earth and Spirit, you see as much beauty in a cold, gray, sleety, December morning as a warm, sunny day in June."

"What a joy to share what I loved most with those I loved most."

"I was struck by the fact that Native American tradition is to recognize Spirit in everything. I started to look at the natural world a little differently."

"The gifts of the Earth are so precious and they are free. Mother Earth puts on a constant show and never charges admission. What I now see is incredible. I know that, as I continue to be in nature, I will be gifted with more and more sight."

"We are moving so quickly in today's world that our experiences are blurred. We need to slow down so that our senses will awaken and our hearts will open. When we learn this and reconnect to nature we are able to receive her energy and the many gifts she has for us."