To walk on this earth is to walk on a living past, on the open pages of history and geology. ("Creations" p79) - Linda Hogan

Mystery is part of each life, and maybe it is healthier to uphold it than to spend a lifetime in search of half-made answers. Still, as humans, we want truth. We are searchers. Our stories, our courthouses, our lives, contemporary anxieties and depressions are all searches full with this desire. Humans want truth the way water desires to be sea level and moves across the continent for the greater ocean. "Memory is a field full of psychological ruins," wrote French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. For some that may be true, but memory is also a field of healing that has the capacity to restore the world, not only for the one person who recollects, but for cultures as well. When a person says "I remember," all things are possible. (p 15)

Even when we have been sent away from that place or have not learned our own languages, we still have it; from subtle gesture and learned ways of being, it is passed down to us. This is "How It Is." The knowledge is in the manner of being, even when the words are not spoken. Our philosophies come of being from a place and a community, of knowing a place and respecting its boundaries.

at school I have learned there’s no room in sky for my mother’s heaven; there’s no room at the center of the earth for hell, either. It is new worlds I will have to look for. (p106)