To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.

What you come to see on the surface is not what you come to know. Emptiness in the desert is the fullness of space, a fullness of space that eliminates time. The desert is time, exposed time, geologic time. One needs time in the desert to see.

Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control

Abundance is a dance with reciprocity, what we can give, what we can share, and what we receive in the process.

Abundance is an expansion of energy. Abundance is a form of gratitude, a generosity, a modesty, a bow toward others what we can give, what we can share, rather than what we can take.

My body is a compass and it does not lie.

If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

I believe that spiritual resistance – the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions when everything around us asks us to concede, that our capacity to face the harsh measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river the rocks. There is a resonance of humility that has evolved with the earth. It is the best retrieved in solitude amidst the stillness of days in the desert.

I think that it’s too much to take on the world. It’s too much to take on Los Angeles. All I can do is to go back home to the canyon where we live and ask the kinds of questions that can make a difference in our neighborhoods.

That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about – the patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible.