A single knole rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Witchita Range. For my people, the s, it is an old landmark, and they gave i… - N. Scott Momaday

Coyotes have the gift of seldom being seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.

At first she thought the writing would be easy. She was extremely confident in her ability to dream, to imagine, and she supposed that expressing her dreams in words, in writing, would be entirely natural, like drawing breath. She had read widely from the time she was a child, and she knew how to recognize something that was well written. She admired certain lines and passages so much that she had taken complete possession of them and committed them to memory. She could recite “The Gettysburg Address” and “The Twenty-Third Psalm.” She could recite “Jabberwocky” and Emily Dickinson’s “Further in summer that the birds” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” She knew by heart the final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead,” and if challenged she could say in whole the parts of both Romeo and Juliet. And she knew many Kiowa stories and many long prayers in Navajo. These were not feats of memory in the ordinary sense; it was simply that she attended to these things so closely that they became a part of her most personal experience. She had assumed them, appropriated them to her being.
But to write! She discovered that was something else again.

Yahweh to Urset

I pray that you are kept safe throughout this day, that
you live as wholly as you can, that you see things that
you have not seen before and that more of them are
beautiful than not, more of them delightful than not.
I pray that you hold easily in your hands the balance
of the earth and sky, that you laugh and cry, know
freedom and restraint, some joy and some sorrow,
pleasure and pain, much of life and a little of death.
I pray that you are grateful for the gift of your being,
and I pray that you celebrate your life in the proper
way, with grace and humility, wonder and contentment,
in the strong, deep current of your spirit’s voice. I pray
that you are happily in love with the dawn and that you
are more deeply in love in the dusk.