We humans must revere the earth, for it is our well-being. Always the earth grants us what we need. If we treat the earth with kindness, it will trea… - N. Scott Momaday
" "We humans must revere the earth, for it is our well-being. Always the earth grants us what we need. If we treat the earth with kindness, it will treat us kindly. If we give our belief to the earth, it will believe in us. There is no better blessing than to be believed in. There are those who believe that the earth is dead. They are deceived. The earth is alive, and it is possessed of spirit. Consider the holy tree. It can be allowed to thirst. It can be cut down. Worst of all, it can be denied our faith in it, our belief. But if we speak to it, if we pray, it will thrive.
About N. Scott Momaday
N. Scott Momaday (February 27, 1934 – January 24, 2024) was a Kiowa novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance. His follow-up work The Way to Rainy Mountain blended folklore with memoir. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work's celebration and preservation of indigenous oral and art traditions. He held twenty honorary degrees from colleges and universities and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Additional quotes by N. Scott Momaday
Something of our relationship to the earth is determined by the particular place we stand at a given time. If you stand still long enough to observe carefully the things around you, you will find beauty, and you will know wonder. If you see a leaf carried along on the flow of a river, you might ponder its journey. Where did it begin, and where will it end? What will be the story of its passage? You will discover a thousand ways in which the leaf is connected to the water, the banks, the near and farther distances, the sky and the sun. Your mind, your spirit will be nourished and grow. You will become one with what you see. Consider what is to be seen.
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Division
There is a depth of darkness
In the wild country, days of evening
And the silence of the moon.
I have crept upon the bare ground
Where animals have left their tracks,
And faint cries carry on the summits,
Or sink to silence in the muffled leaves.
Here is the world of wolves and bears
And of old, instinctive being,
So noble and indifferent as to be remote
To human knowing. The scales upon which
We seek a balance measure only a divide.