What is it that brings me here to stand like a rock in this river of sound? - Robin Wall Kimmerer

The land knows you, even when you are lost.

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.

a lot of the problems that we face in terms of sustainability and environment lie at the juncture of nature and culture. So we can’t just rely on a single way of knowing that explicitly excludes values and ethics. That’s not going to move us forward.