Quotes from Terry Tempest Williams

I walk with my shadow behind me, sometimes ahead, and often to the side. It is my capricious companion: visible, then hidden, amorphous. A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don't want to see. If we refuse to face our shadow, it will project itself on someone else so we have no choice but to engage it.

To acknowledge that which we cannot see, to give definition to that which we do not know, to create divine order out of chaos, is the religious dance.

If our national parks are to remain viable in the future, they must become sites of transformation where the paradigm of domination and manipulation ends and a vision of unison begins

Today, everyone thinks we need to stay positive and hopeful and not be completely honest about what we are seeing, what we know to be true. Whether we're talking about climate change or what's occurring on the streets in Ferguson, we are so afraid of offending people...and then, we only talk to our own constituencies and its' the same rhetoric over and over again until the words become bloodless. (p. 325)

In the desert I often whisper. Junipers are excellent sounding boards. They have been shaped by wing. Rocks seem to care nothing about what I say, yet when I speak to them, they feel porous, capable of receiving my words and taking them in as part of their history of brokenness.

Hindsight shows us our blind spots and biases; we can recognize ourselves as human beings caught in the cultural mores of a specific time.

The purpose of life is to see," the writer Jack Turner

I have learned that there is no such thing as one portrait or one story, only the knowledge of our own experience shared. I no longer see America's national parks as 'our best idea,' but our evolving idea; I see our national parks as our ongoing struggle as a diverse people to create circles of reverence in a time of collective cynicism where we are wary of being moved by anything but our own clever perspective.

For all of us, Acadia is another breathing space. Perhaps that is what parks are - breathing spaces for a society that increasingly holds its breath. Here on the edge of the continent in this marriage between wind and sea, the weaving of currents offers a tapestry of belief.

Again and again, we find this common story of the establishment of our national parks: a handful of people who fall in love with a place, see it threatened, want to protect it for the future, and have the passion and patience to attract the necessary funding and political clout to make it happen.

Our national parks hold our stories in inexplicable ways. Acadia National Park may be small in size but the vista it offers across the Atlantic is a passionate genealogy of all that is infinite and alive above and below the surface.

Creating a monument is a matter of taste and values and the means to get it made. Once you monumentalize a person, place, or thing, you run the risk of worship. And what we worship, for better or for worse, freezes the story.

For far too long we have been seduced into walking a path that did not lead us to ourselves. For far too long we have said yes when we wanted to say no. And for far too long we have said no when we desperately wanted to say yes.

Gettysburg is at risk of becoming a place of war worship. In our desperation to perceive valor and courage that may not be present in our own lives, we glorify a terrible slaughter of men and boys. The myth that war propagates and that our national memory perpetuates is that all soldiers are valiant and brave, and that American history is a history victorious instead of shadowed and scarred.

Dare to be burned by the heat of our own ambitious hearts.

Where does America end and Mexico begin? This is its own country, borderless by nature, unowned, unbowed, complete. Boundaries are fears made manifest, designed to protect us. I don't want protection, I want freedom.

Leaning against an oak tree for shade, I can't help but confront my own ignorance regarding these issues. I remember the grape boycott, but little else. It was not my struggle. That was my privilege. Now I see it differently. Acts of injustice undermine all of us. The privacy of hypocrisy is corrosive.

We, the people, have made mistakes. We have made mistakes in our relationships with those who came before us and the land that holds their histories. We have made mistakes in how we have managed and misunderstood the wild. But after spending a lifetime immersed in our national parks, I believe we are slowly learning what it means to offer our reverence and respect to the closest thing we as American citizens have to sacred lands. Our national parks are places of recognition.

We form the future by being caretakers of our past.

When we don't listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don't, others will abandon us. We've been raised to question what we know, to discount and discredit the authority of our gut. I want to know why. I regret whenever I abandon myself. But harboring regrets is making love to the past, and there is no movement here... I am growing beyond my own conditioning, breaking set with what was breaking me.

What I know in my bones is that I forgot to take time to remember what I know. The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.

There is an organic difference between a system of self-sufficiency and a self sustaining system. One precludes diversity, the other necessitates it.

I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.

Good work is a stay against despair.