May my heart hold the earth all the days of my life. And when I am gone to the farther camps, may my name sound on the green hills, and may the cedar… - N. Scott Momaday

He had a strange feeling there, as if some ancestral intelligence had been awakened in him for the first time. There is the wild growth and the soft glowing of the earth, in the muddy water at his feet, was something profoundly original. He could not put his finger on it, but it was there. It was itself genesis, he thought, not genesis in the public domain, not an Old Testament Tale, but his genesis. He wanted to see his father there in the shadows of the still creek, the child he once was, himself in the child and the man. But he could not. there was only something like a photograph, old and faded, a shadow within a shadow,

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk.

In the dense growth of the bottomland a dark drift moves on the . A spider enters a small pool of light on Rainy Mountain Creek, and downstream, at the convergence, a Channel catfish turns around in the current and slithers to the surface, where a dragonfly hovers and darts. Away on the high ground grasshoppers and bees set up a crackle and roar in the fields, and the s and scissortails whistle and wheel about. Somewhere in the maze of gullies a calf shivers and balls in a tangle of chinaberry trees. And high in the distance a hawk turns in the sun and sails.