Quotes from Kathleen Dean Moore

I was happy then, standing in the surge with lines of moonlight catching on my rubber boots. This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.

It is a heartache, honestly, to be so shunned. I have never understood why a creator god would go to so much trouble to separate one thing from another—the light from the darkness, waters that were under the firmament from waters that were above, the seas from the dry land, and worst of all, humankind from the fishes of the sea and the birds of the air and every creeping thing.

Maybe the forest is a prayer tonight, bent under the weight of all that winter, the whole world on its knees. Or maybe the prayer is the hush. Could I pray this way, letting the night settle onto my thoughts like snow on my shoulders, that gently? Hush. My snowshoes shuffle through the drifts. Hush: one snowshoe, then another. There is no other sound.

To see to the depth of a river, wade into still water. In the silent space under the slick of the world, the river clears. If you stand still too, so as not to wrinkle the water, you will see the shadows of minnows. You will smell sage and melting snow and you will notice, incised into the topography of the silt, little river channels pointing to the sea. And isn't this what you had hoped to find? A quiet place where everything comes clear and the Earth itself shows the way to the one thing.

You have to do something after a while, don't you?