I don’t quite remember what motivated me, in 1994, to end a book entitled Desert Legends with these words:
“To restore any place, we must also begin to re-story it, to make it the lesson of our legends, festivals, and seasonal rites. Story is the way we encode deep-seeded values into our culture. By replenishing the land with our stories, we let the many wild voices guide the restoration work we do. The stories will outlast us. When such voices are firmly rooted, the floods of modern technological change won’t ever have a chance to dislodge them from the earth.”
But now, as we approach the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, I pray for all those of every faith, culture and nation who have died because of being dislodged from the place they loved the most. I pray that we can help restore the places—both public and private where they fell— to be both more humane and more connected to the wild within us, not less.
Brother Coyote, OEF
