Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth… Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. … - Robin Wall Kimmerer

Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us.

Wabunong—the East—is the direction of knowledge. We send gratitude to the East for the chance to learn every day, to start anew.

The world has a way of guiding your steps.

Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into the sun's glare, the landscape is only a flat projection with mountain ranges reduced to wrinkles in the continental skin. Oblivious to our passage overhead, other stories are unfolding beneath us. Blackberries ripen in the August sun, a woman packs a suitcase and hesitates at her doorway, a letter is opened and the most surprising photograph slides from between the pages. But we are moving too fast and we are too far away; all the stories escape us, except our own. When I turn away from the window, the stories recede into the two-dimensional map of green and brown below. Like a trout disappearing into the shade of an overhanging bank, leaving you staring at the flat surface of the water and wondering if you saw it at all.