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Remember On This One Thing, Said Badger. The Stories People Tell Have A Way Of Taking Care Of Them. If Stories Come To You, Care For Them. And Learn To Give Them Away Where They Are Needed. Sometimes A Person Needs A Story More Than Food To Stay Alive. That Is Why We Put These Stories In Each Other's Memories. This Is How People Care For Themselves.

-Barry Lopez

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Remember On This One

Barry Lopez

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Remember On This One Thing, Said Badger. The Stories People Tell Have A Way Of Taking Care Of Them. If Stories Come To You, Care For Them. And Learn To Give Them Away Where They Are Needed. Sometimes A Person Needs A Story More Than Food To Stay Alive. That Is Why We Put These Stories In Each Other's Memories. This Is How People Care For Themselves.

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The Land Gets Inside Of Us; And We Must Decide One Way Or Another What This Means, What We Will Do About It.

Conversations Are Efforts Toward Good Relations. They Are An Elementary Form Of Reciprocity. They Are The Exercise Of Our Love For Each Other. They Are The Enemies Of Our Loneliness, Our Doubt, Our Anxiety, Our Tendencies To Abdicate. To Continue To Be In Good Conversation Over Our Enormous And Terrifying Problems Is To Be Calling Out To Each Other In The Night. If We Attend With Imagination And Devotion To Our Conversations, We Will Find What We Need; And Someone Among Us Will Act—it Does Not Matter Whom—and We Will Survive.

People Think That If You've Written A Book And Somebody's Given You A Pat On The Back Then, You Know, It's All - You're All Settled, You Know? You're Going To Be Fine. I Know That If I'm Not Confused, And Really Afraid, My Work Isn't Going To Be Any Good.

My Function As A Writer Is To Provide An Atmosphere In Which People Can Think Wisely About What We're Doing On This Planet.

When I Sit At That Typewriter, I Have To Be Frightened Of What I'm Trying To Do. I'm Frightened By My Own Belief That I Can Actually Get A Story Down On Paper.

My Faith Is In My Colleagues. And When I Meet Other Writers, Journalists, Who've Been Doing This For A Long Time, Trying To Make Us Aware Of What It Is That We're Living In, I Put My Faith In Those People.

The Opposite Of Love Is Not Hate; It's Indifference. To Be Indifferent Is To Not Express Love.

Throughout The Centuries We Have Projected On To The Wolf The Qualities We Most Despise And Fear In Ourselves.

I Lay There Knowing Something Eerie Ties Us To The World Of Animals. Sometimes The Animals Pull You Backward Into It. You Share Hunger And Fear With Them Like Salt In Blood.

The Interior Landscape Responds To The Character And Subtlety Of The Exterior Landscape; The Shape Of The Individual Mind Is Affected By The Land As It Is By Genes.

I Know Of No Restorative Of Heart, Body, And Soul More Effective Against Hopelessness Than The Restoration Of The Earth.

The Land Is Like Poetry: It Is Inexplicably Coherent, It Is Transcendent In Its Meaning, And It Has The Power To Elevate A Consideration Of Human Life.

For So Many Centuries, The Exchange Of Gifts Has Held Us Together. It Has Made It Possible To Bridge The Abyss Where Language Struggles.

There Are Simply No Answers To Some Of The Great Pressing Questions.

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If There Is A Stage At Which An Individual Life Becomes Truly Adult, It Must Be When One Grasps The Irony In Its Unfolding And Accepts Responsibility For A Life Lived In The Midst Of Such Paradox.

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The Gaze Of The Wolf Reached Into Our Soul.

Sometimes A Person Needs A Story More Than Food To Stay Alive.

If I Were To Offer Any Advice To Young Writers, It Would Be This: Be Discriminating And Be Discerning About The Work You Set For Yourself. That Done, Be The Untutored Traveler, The Eager Reader, The Enthusiastic Listener. Put What You Learn Together Carefully, And Then Write Thoughtfully, With Respect Both For The Reader And Your Sources.

When We Enter The Landscape To Learn Something, We Are Obligated, I Think, To Pay Attention Rather Than Constantly To Pose Questions. To Approach The Land As We Would A Person, By Opening An Intelligent Conversation. And To Stay In One Place, To Make Of That One, Long Observation A Fully Dilated Experience. We Will Always Be Rewarded If We Give The Land Credit For More Than We Imagine, And If We Imagine It As Being More Complex Even Than Language. In These Ways We Begin, I Think, To Find A Home, To Sense How To Fit A Place.

Would The Last Animal, Eating Garbage And Living On The Last Scrap Of Land, His Mate Dead, Would He Still Forgive You?

It Is The Imagination That Gives Shape To The Universe.

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To Put Your Hands In A River Is To Feel The Chords That Bind The Earth Together.

No Culture Has Yet Solved The Dilemma Each Has Faced With The Growth Of A Conscious Mind: How To Live A Moral And Compassionate Existence When One Is Fully Aware Of The Blood, The Horror Inherent In All Life, When One Finds Darkness Not Only In One’s Own Culture But Within Oneself.

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One Must Live In The Middle Of Contradiction, Because If All Contradiction Were Eliminated At Once, Life Would Collapse. There Are Simply No Definitive Answers To Some Of The Great Pressing Questions. You Continue To Live Them Out Making Your Life A Worthy Expression Of Leaning Into The Light.

Watching The Animals Come And Go, And Feeling The Land Swell Up To Meet Them And Then Feeling It Grow Still At Their Departure, I Came To Think Of The Migrations As Breath, As The Land Breathing. In Spring A Great Inhalation Of Light And Animals. The Long-bated Breath Of Summer. And An Exhalation That Propelled Them All South In The Fall.

Eden Is A Conversation. It Is The Conversation Of The Human With The Divine. And It Is The Reverberations Of That Conversation That Create A Sense Of Place. It Is Not A Thing, Eden, But A Pattern Of Relationships, Made Visible In Conversation. To Live In Eden Is To Live In The Midst Of Good Relations, Of Just Relations Scrupulously Attended To, Imaginatively Maintained Through Time. Altogether We Call This Beauty.

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