"The planet, our mother, Grandmother Earth, is physical and therefore a spiritual, mental, and emotional being. Planets are alive, as are all their by-products or expressions, such as animals, vegetables, minerals, climatic and meteorological phenomena. Believing that our mother, the beloved earth, is inert matter is destructive to yourself. (There's little you can do to her, believe it or not.) Such beliefs point to a dangerously diseased physicality. Being good, holy, and/or politically responsible means being able to accept whatever life brings and that includes just about everything you usually think of as unacceptable, like disease, death, and violence. Walking in balance, in harmony, and in a sacred manner requires staying in your body, accepting its discomforts, decayings, witherings, and blossomings and respecting them. Your body is also a planet, replete with creatures that live in and on it."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Novelists from the United StatesLiterary criticsCritics from the United States20th-century poets from the United StatesFeminists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Article anthologized in The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World edited by Linda Hogan (writer) and Brenda Peterson (2001)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paula_Gunn_Allen
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Paula Gunn Allen
Paula Gunn Allen (October 24, 1939 – May 29, 2008) was an American poet, literary critic, activist, professor, and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American, Native American, and Arab-American descent, she identified with her mother's people, the Laguna Pueblo and childhood years. She drew from its oral traditions for her fiction poetry and also wrote numerous essays on its themes. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary works and wrote two biographies
114 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Paula Gunn Allen →
Related Quotes
"The power of imagination, of image, which is the fundamental power of literature, is the power to determine a people’…"
"Can we, as scholars and teachers facing the twenty-first century, fail to realize that "something there is that does …"
"In America, law substitutes for custom. In America, society substitutes for love of family, comrade, village, or trib…"
"The Indian way includes ample room for vision translated into meaningful action and custom and thought, and it is bec…"
"The community is the greatest threat to the American Individual Ethic; and it is the community that must be punished …"
"There is a widespread belief that we, Native American and nonnative alike, have nothing to celebrate. All too many be…"
"I am Laguna, woman of the lake, daughter of the dawn, sunrise, kurena. I can see the light making the world anew. It …"
"When I was small, my mother often told me that animals, insects, and plants are to be treated with the kind of respec…"
"Indians endure—both in the sense of living through something so complete in its destructiveness that the mere presenc…"
"Timelessness—that place where one is whole."