N Scott Momaday Quotes

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.

As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.

I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.

They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.

We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.

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.

In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.

Art is affirmation.

To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.

There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it.

To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion.

He wondered what his sorrow was and could not remember.

It was not an exclamation so much, I think, as it was a warding off, an exertion of language upon ignorance and disorder.

There was a man who killed a buffalo bull to no purpose, only he wanted the blood on his hands.

He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God.

It's a matter of honor, death. It's your white page, do you see? Or your shame. Either you're worthy of it or you ain't. To accept it, to face it with honor and respect and goodwill, to earn it, that is to be brave.

We perceive existence by means of words and names. To this or that vague, potential thing I will give a name, and it will exist thereafter, and its existence will be clearly perceived. The name enables me to see it. I can call it by its name, and I can see it for what it is.

The events of one’s life take place, take place. How often have I used this expression, and how often have I stopped to think about what it means? Events do indeed take place, they have meaning in relation to things around them.

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk.

You see, I am alive, I am alive I stand in good relation to the earth I stand in good relation to the gods I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte You see, I am alive, I am alive

Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.

In the white man's world, language, too -- and the way which the white man thinks of it--has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language -- for the Word itself -- as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.

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.

If coupling should but make us whole / And of the selfsame mind and soul, / Then couple let's in celebration; / We have contained the population.

There was a time when “man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent,” this New World, “commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” I would strive with all my strength to give that sense of wonder to those who will come after me.

I wonder if in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.

María Delgado confesses 9 mortal & 32 venial sins! & wonders exceedingly at the 9 as if they had been miracles.

Sill. Their horses and weapons were confiscated, and they were imprisoned. In a field just

Yes, I thought, now I see the earth as it really is; never again will I see things as I saw them yesterday or the day before.

The earth is a house of stories. Akeah-de.

You are the dark shape I find On nights of the spilling moon, Pale in the pool of heaven. — N. Scott Momaday, from “Revenant” The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2020)

Abel,' she said after a moment, 'do you think that I am beautiful?' She had gone to the opposite wall and turned. She leaned back with her hands behind her, throwing her head a little in order to replace a lock of hair that had fallen across her brow. She sucked at her cheeks, musing. 'No, not beautiful,' he said.

When we dance the earth trembles. When our steps fall on the earth we feel the shudder of life beneath us, and the earth feels the beating of our hearts, and we become one with the earth. We shall not sever ourselves from the earth. We must chant our being, and we must dance in time with the rhythms of the earth. We must keep the earth.

The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming; a long outwaiting.

I prayed. He was going home, and I wanted to pray. Look out for me, I said; look out each day and listen for me. And we were going together on horses to the hills. We were going to ride out in the first light to the hills. We were going to see how it was, and always was, how the sun came up with a little wind and the light ran out upon the land. We were going to get drunk, I said. We were going to be all alone, and we were going to get drunk and sing. We were going to sing about the way it always was. And it was going to be right and beautiful. It was going to be the last time. And he was going home.

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.

And the simple act of listening is crucial to the concept of language, more crucial even than reading and writing, and language in turn is crucial to human society.

His mane is made of short rainbows.

And the journey is an evocation of three things in particular: a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit, which endures.

If you stand still long enough to observe carefully the things around you, you will find beauty, and you will know wonder.

She was not listening at the level of language but beneath it, in the deep recesses of the imagination.

The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn—an illusion still in the land—rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; by wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence.

Iwígara channels the idea that all life, spiritual and physical, is interconnected in a continual cycle [and] expresses the belief that all life shares the same breath. We are all related to, and play a role in, the complexity of life.” Knowing that I am related to everything around me and share breath with all living things helps me to focus on my responsibility to honor all forms of life. Or, as native writer N. Scott Momaday puts it, everything around us has “being-ness.

May my heart hold the earth all the days of my life. And when I am gone to the farther camps, may my name sound on the green hills, and may the cedar smoke that I have breathed drift on the canyon walls and among the branches of living trees. May birds of many colors encircle the soil where my steps have been placed, and may the deer, the lion, and the bear of the mountains be touched by the blessings that have touched me. May I chant the praises of the wild land, and may my spirit range on the wind forever.

How many lifeless things are placed each day between us and the living earth? A friend in Brooklyn told me that his little son had gone out to watch workmen breaking up a sidewalk. He was fascinated to see earth under the cement. He had never seen it before.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things. By means of words can a man deal with the world on equal terms. And the word is sacred. A man's name is his own; he can keep it or give it away as he likes.

To say “beyond the mountain,” and to mean it, to mean, simply, beyond everything for which the mountain stands, of which it signifies the being. Somewhere, if only she could see it, there was neither nothing nor anything. And there, just there, that was the last reality.

the old men running after evil, their white leggings holding in motion like smoke above the ground. They passed in the night, full of tranquillity, certitude. There was no sound of breathing or sign of effort about them. They ran as water runs. There was a burning at his eyes.

East of my grandmother's house the sun rises out of the plain. Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.

In the beginning was the Word'. I have taken as my text this evening the almighty Word itself. Now get this: 'There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.' Amen, brothers and sisters, Amen. And the riddle of the Word, 'In the beginning was the Word....' Now what do you suppose old John meant by that? That cat was a preacher, and, well, you know how it is with preachers; he had something big on his mind. Oh my, it was big; it was the Truth, and it was heavy, and old John hurried to set it down. And in his hurry he said too much. 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' It was the Truth, all right, but it was more than the Truth. The Truth was overgrown with fat, and the fat was God. The fat was John's God, and God stood between John and the Truth. Old John, see, he got up one morning and caught sight of the Truth. It must have been like a bolt of lightning, and the sight of it made him blind. And for a moment the vision burned on the back of his eyes, and he knew what it was. In that instant he saw something he had never seen before and would never see again. That was the instant of revelation, inspiration, Truth. And old John, he must have fallen down on his knees. Man, he must have been shaking and laughing and crying and yelling and praying - all at the same time - and he must have been drunk and delirious with the Truth. You see, he had lived all his life waiting for that one moment, and it came, and it took him by surprise, and it was gone. And he said, 'In the beginning was the Word....' And man, right then and there he should have stopped. There was nothing more to say, but he went on. He had said all there was to say, everything, but he went on. 'In the beginning was the Word....' Brothers and sisters, that was the Truth, the whole of it, the essential and eternal Truth, the bone and blood and muscle of the Truth. But he went on, old John, because he was a preacher. The perfect vision faded from his mind, and he went on. The instant passed, and then he had nothing but a memory. He was desperate and confused, and in his confusion he stumbled and went on. 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' He went on to talk about Jews and Jerusalem, Levites and Pharisees, Moses and Philip and Andrew and Peter. Don't you see? Old John had to go on. That cat had a whole lot at stake. He couldn't let the Truth alone. He couldn't see that he had come to the end of the Truth, and he went on. He tried to make it bigger and better than it was, but instead he only demeaned and encumbered it. He made it soft and big with fat. He was a preacher, and he made a complex sentence of the Truth, two sentences, three, a paragraph. He made a sermon and theology of the Truth. He imposed his idea of God upon the everlasting Truth. 'In the beginning was the Word....' And that is all there was, and it was enough.

A Witness to Creation If you could have that one day back, the one that you have kept a secret in your soul, what day would it be? What? One among the many? Well, let me make you this offering: It would be the day on which I stood on the rim of Monument Valley and beheld those ineffable monoliths for the first time. I was young, you see, like a fledgling who leaves the nest and flies out over the earth. I saw beyond time, into timelessness. It was the first and holiest of all days. On such a day— on that original day—did the First Man behold the First World. It filled him with wonder and humility. Then and there, looking for one enchanted moment into eternity, I was the First Man. I was present at Creationl

Far below, the breeze ran upon the shining blades of corn, and they heard the footsteps running. It was faint at first and far away, but it rose and drew near, steadily, a hundred men running, two hundred, three, not fast, but running easily and forever, the one sound of a hundred men running. “Listen,” he said. “It is the race of the dead, and it happens here.

There is no love without loss. I hear the drums that vibrate to the heartbeat of the earth. They set me dancing. I see the clouds that wreathe the summits. They set me dreaming. I know the wonder of waves that shake the headlands. They awaken my soul. I hear the screams of eagles on the wind. And I ponder, what are these things to me who loves and does not reckon loss? Do I not keep the earth?

The landscape conveys an impression of absolute permanence. It is not hostile. It is simply there—untouched, silent and complete. It is very lonely, yet the absence of all human traces gives you the feeling you understand this land and can take your place in it. EDMUND CARPENTER Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk. N. SCOTT MOMADAY

La tierra del Encanto Clouds build on the northern ridge Where the shades of night grow pale And there comes a rain like smoke. The mountains loom and recede. And Below, the umber plain is a pitted hide. There the distance of time runs out. And the mind extends beyond itself. I have seen in the twist of wind The landscape severed and heard The edged cries of streaming hawks First light is a tapestry on canyon walls, And shadows are pools of illusions. I am a man of the ancient earth For I have know the desert at dawn

Some years ago the prayer tree at Rainy Mountain was struck by lightning. It burned and turned black, but it did not fall. There had not been time to speak of the tree to Man-ka-ih, the storm spirit. The tree seemed to be dead. But a long time afterward there appeared a tiny sprig of green on a charred limb, and then the hidden life of the tree burst out in a hundred leaves. It was a wondrous sight, and I wept to see it. I believe that the earth gave of its irresistible life to the tree. How can we not give thanks in return?

The other, latecoming things—the beasts of burden and of trade, the horse and the sheep, the dog and the cat—these have an alien and inferior aspect, a poverty of vision and instinct, by which they are estranged from the wild land, and made tentative. They are born and die upon the land, but then they are gone away from it as if they had never been. Their dust is borne away in the wind, and their cries have no echo in the rain and the river, the commotion of wings, the return of boughs bent by the passing of dark shapes in the dawn and dusk.

The waters tell of time. Always rivers run upon the earth and quench its thirst. Bright water carries our burdens across long distances. Without water we, and all that we know, would wither and die. We measure time by the flow of water as it passes us by. But in truth it is we who pass through time. Once I traveled on a great river though a canyon. The walls of the canyon were so old as to be timeless. There came a sunlit rain, and a double rainbow arched the river. There was mystery and meaning in my passage. I beheld things that others had beheld thousands of years ago. The earth is a place of wonder and beauty.

Those who came before me did not take for granted the world in which they lived. They blessed the air with smoke and pollen. They touched the ground, the trees, the stones with respect and reverence. I believe that they imagined me before I was born, that they prepared the way for me, that they placed their faith and hope in me and in the generations that followed and will follow them. Will I give my children an inheritance of the earth? Or will I give them less than I was given? On one side of time there are herds of buffalo and antelope. Redbud trees and chokecherries splash color on the plain. The waters are clear, and there is a glitter on the early morning grass. You breathe in the fresh fragrances of rain and wind on which are borne silence and serenity. It is good to be alive in this world. But on the immediate side there is the exhaust of countless machines, toxic and unavoidable. The planet is warming, and the northern ice is melting. Fires and floods wreak irresistible havoc. The forests are diminished and waste piles upon us. Thousands of species have been destroyed. Our own is at imminent risk. The earth and its inhabitants are in crisis, and at the center it is a moral crisis. Man stands to repudiate his humanity. I make a prayer for words. Let me say my heart

The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.

Prairie Hymn: On the tongue a hymnal of American names, And the silence of falling snow—Glacier, Bearpaw, Bitterroot, Wind River, Yellowstone. I dreamed among the ice caps long ago, Ranging with the sun on the inward slope, Down the wheel of seasons and the solstices To the tilted moon and cradle of the stars. There was the prairie, always reaching. Time was sundered, and the light bore wonder. The earth broke open and I held my breath. In the far range of vision the prairie shone bright As brit on the sea, crescive and undulant… The range of dawn and dusk; the continent lay out In prairie shades, in a vast carpet of color and light. In the Sun Dance I was entranced, I drew in the smoke Of ancient ice and sang of the wide ancestral land. Rain-laden clouds ringed the horizon, and the hump-backed Shape sauntered and turned. Mythic deity! It became the animal representation of the sun, an In the prairie wind there was summer in the spring.

It was simply that they were grave, distant, intent upon something that she could not see. Their eyes were held upon some vision out of range, something away in the end of distance, some reality that she did not know, or even suspect. What was it that they saw? Probably they saw nothing after all, nothing at all. But then that was the trick, wasn’t it? To see nothing at all, nothing in the absolute. To see beyond the landscape, beyond every shape and shadow and color, that was to see nothing. That was to be free and finished, complete, spiritual. To see nothing slowly and by degrees, at last; to see first the pure, bright colors of near things, then all pollutions of color, all things blended and vague and dim in the distance, to see finally beyond the clouds and the pale wash of the sky—the none and nothing beyond that. To say “beyond the mountain,” and to mean it, to mean, simply, beyond everything for which the mountain stands, of which it signifies the being. Somewhere, if only she could see it, there was neither nothing nor anything. And there, just there, that was the last reality. Even so, in the same attitude of non-being, Abel had cut the wood. She had not seen into his eyes until it was too late, until they had returned upon everything.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chiang Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Secrets, by Nuruddin Farah

I am a man of the ancient earth For I have known the desert at dawn.

There are things in nature which engender an awful quiet in the heart of man; Devils Tower is one of them. Man must account for it. He must never fail to explain such a thing to himself, or else he is estranged forever from the universe.

The moan of the wind grew loud, and it filled him with dread. For the rest of his life it would be for him the particular sound of anguish.

Coyotes have the gift of being seldom seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands.

as if the prehistoric civilization had gone out among the hills for a little while and would return; and then everything would be restored to an older age, and time would have returned upon itself and a bad dream of invasion and change would have been dissolved in an hour before the dawn. For man, too, has tenure in the land; he dwelt upon the land twenty-five thousand years ago, and his gods before him. The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.

He was too old to be afraid. His acknowledgment of the unknown was nothing more than a dull, intrinsic sadness, a vague desire to weep, for evil had long since found him out and knew who he was.

The crippled old man in leggings and white ceremonial trousers shuffled out into the late afternoon. He dried his eyes on his sleeve and whimpered one last time in his throat. He was grown too old, he thought. He could not understand what had happened. But even his sorrow was feeble now; it had withered, like his leg, over the years, and only once in a while, when something unusual happened to remind him of it, did it take on the edge and point of pain.

for old men do not hunger much.

Look! Look! There are blue and purple horses . . . a house made of dawn. . . .

Now that I can have her only in memory, I see my grandmother in the several postures that were peculiar to her:

I did not always understand her prayers; I believe they were made of an older language than that of ordinary speech. There was something inherently sad in the sound, some slight hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow. She began in a high and descending pitch, exhausting her breath to silence; then again and again—and always the same intensity of effort, of something that is, and is not, like urgency in the human voice. Transported so in the dim and dancing light among the shadows of her room, she seemed beyond the reach of time, as if age could not lay hold of her.

It is said that hawks, when they have nothing to fear in the open land, dance upon the warm carnage of their kills.

you imagine there is nothing within, and indeed there are many ghosts, bones given up to the land. They stand here and there against the sky, and you approach them for a longer time than you expect. They belong in the distance; it is their domain.

There is no earth without the sun and moon. There is no earth without the stars. When we die, Dragonfly says, we go to the farther camps. Death is not the end of life. There is life in the farther camps. The stars are fires in the farther camps.

They must know the long journey of the sun on the black mesa, how it rode in the seasons and the years, and they must live according to the sun appearing, for only then could they reckon where they were, where all things were, in time.

These things he told to his grandsons carefully, slowly and at length, because they were old and true, and they could be lost forever as easily as one generation is lost to the next, as easily as one old man might lose his voice, having spoken not enough or not at all.

And he did not want to break the stillness of the night, for it was holy and profound; it was rest and restoration, the hunter’s offering of death and the sad watch of the hunted, waiting somewhere away in the cold darkness and breathing easily of its life, brooding around at last to forgiveness and consent; the silence was essential to them both, and it lay out like a bond between them, ancient and inviolable.

She was the child of a witch. She was wild like her mother, that old Pecos woman whom he feared, whom everyone feared because she had long white hair about her mouth and she hated them and kept to herself. But the girl was young and beautiful, and her name was Porcingula. The women of the town talked about her behind her back, but she only laughed; she had her way with their sons, and her eyes blazed and gave them back their scorn.

Where language touches the earth there is the holy.” —N. SCOTT MOMADAY

This happened a long time ago. I was not there. My father was there when he was a boy. He told me of it. And I was there.

It is in human nature to pray. It is appropriate that we lay our words upon the earth. And so: Great Mystery, you who dwell in the endless beyond, you who spoke the first word and made of your breath the mountains and the waters, the trees and the grasses, the man and the woman and the child, hear me in my small voice. I am your thankful creature.

I am Tsoai-talee, Rock Tree Boy, and I will carry that name to the end of the world and beyond. I will keep to the trees and waters, and I will be the singing of the soil. In my truest being I am a keeper of the earth. I will tell the ancient stories and I will sing the holy songs. I belong to the land.

Those who deny the spirit of the earth, who do not see that the earth is alive and sacred, who poison the earth and inflict wounds upon it have no shame and are without the basic virtues of humanity. And they bring ridicule upon themselves.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard

We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined. —N. Scott Momaday

Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolated; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.

I do not speak Kiowa, and I never understood her prayers, but there was something inherently sad in the sound, some merest hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow.

There was a woman whose body was swollen up with child, and she got stuck in the log. After that, no one could get through, and that is why the Kiowas are a small tribe in number.

I have walked in a mountain meadow bright with Indian paintbrush, lupine, and wild buckwheat, and I have seen high in the branches of a lodgepole pine the male pine grosbeak, round and rose-colored, its dark, striped wings nearly invisible in the soft, mottled light. And the uppermost branches of the tree seemed very slowly to ride across the blue sky.

In the autumn of 1874, the Kiowas were driven southward towards the Staked Plains. Columns of troops were converging upon them from all sides, and they were bone-weary and afraid.

He was alone and running on. . . . He could see. . . . He was running, and under his breath he began to sing. . . . He had only the words of a song. And he went running on the rise of the song.

This belongs to an eagle, he says. And the eagle belongs to the earth and sky. The feather, by itself, may seem a small thing, but the creature of which it is a part is very powerful. That power resides in this feather. It is a power tha tbinds all thing stogether. When I fold this feather, its power flows into me.

There is no love without loss. I hear the drums that vibrate to the heartbeat of the earth. THey set me dancing. I see the clouds that wreathe the summits. They set me dreaming. I know the wonder of waves that shake the headlands. They awaken my soul.

When the wild herds were destroyed, so too was the will of the Kiowa people; there was nothing to sustain them in spirit.

N. Scott Momaday: A FIRST AMERICAN VIEWS HIS LAND First Man Behold: the earth glitters with leaves: the sky glistens with rain. Pollen is borne on winds that low and lean upon mountains. Cedars blacken the slopes- and pines. I tell my students that the American Indian has a unique investment in the American landscape. It is an investment that represents perhaps thirty thousand years of habitation…the Indian has been here a long time; he is at home here. That simple and obvious truth is one of the most important realities of the Indian world, and it is integrated in the Indian mind and spirit…the Native American’s attitudes towards this land have been formulated over…a span that reaches back to the end of the Ice Age. Very old in the Native American worldview is the conviction that the earth is vital, that there is a spiritual dimension to it, a dimension in which man rightly exists. it follows logically that there are ethical imperatives in this matter: Inasmuch as I am in the land, it is appropriate that I should affirm myself in the spirit of the land. I shall celebrate my life in the world and the world in my life. in the natural order man invest himself in the landscape and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most fundamental experience. This trust is sacred.

Such vastness makes for illusion, a kind of illusion that comprehends reality, and where it exists there is always wonder and exhilaration.