27 Quotes by J.J. Brown

He remembers what the spiritual visionary, Wallace Black Elk, a Lakota said – man’s scratching of the earth causes diseases like cancer. He meant the mining and drilling for coal, gas, oil, uranium. The scratching brings up the things deep in the earth that should have stayed down there.

She listens to the delicate fluttering of sparrows’ wings, tiny messengers. The sound reminds her of life – struggling, beating, rising, flying, and now dissolving into space.

Not everyone needs more money, she says. I don’t. My family doesn’t. You might not realize it, but we have our riches here, and we have our peace. We have the forest, the wildflowers. They’re not weighted the same way your treasures are, not bought and sold. So you don’t recognize the value in them.

We’re close to where the nature preserve starts now, Charlotte says to Henry. The magic begins here. Can you feel it? She suspects he probably can’t. She walks here daily, looking for something, peace mostly. The forest gives her more than she comes looking for, every time.

I love opera. Si. But I am old. No passion in my life, you know? I work, I walk slowly now through my years... but opera! I see, I hear that passion, Eva. Is like the passion of youth. And I live again. I feel something.

So much for land ownership, Henry thinks; it’s a modern myth. You can buy and sell rights to use the land; you can’t actually own it. He tries to remember who said, the land doesn’t belong to you, you belong to the land; the author was certainly Native American, but he can’t pin down the source.

Oma says, when we were put on earth a really long time ago, each person came with a plant to heal all the troubles that come later... We’ve got Indian balsam, sage, wild rose. We’ve got juniper berries and honeysuckle. All of them do something different inside, heal things.

Older people are always searching for treasure, but she thinks they look in the wrong places. If they knew about her herb garden, the roses in bloom, and Maman’s horse, Beth is certain people would value all these things. They would love them like she does when she sits behind her house, breathing, dreaming.

Daniel’s desk by the window is piled high with his drawings. The artwork is everything. He thinks of himself as the act of drawing. His body of work is his life, it is his continuity. The drawings show outwardly that inner place where he is still alive, a thread to connect him with the world.