“I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and self-contain’d.
I stand and look at them and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So they show their relations to me and I accept them.
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them
plainly in their possession.
I wonder where they get those tokens.
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently
drop them?”
–Walt Whitman
“So the old people laugh
when they hear talk about the ‘desecration’ of the earth,
because humankind they know
is nothing in comparison to the earth.”
–Leslie Marmon Silko
Pueblo Nation
Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit
Elisa's Spot 