Heat Moon
Heat Moon
keeps learn religion reminding respect sand wind
Our religion keeps reminding us that we aren't just will and thoughts. We're also sand and wind and thunder. Rain. The seasons. All those things. You learn to respect everything because you are everything. If you respect yourself, you respect all things.
design migration moments places saw
Then I saw a design. There on the map...For me, the migration had been to places and moments of glimpsed clarity.
becomes judge
What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do, especially in other people's minds.
ocean rivers twenties
Having made the trip from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean myself going up up up against twenty-five hundred miles of the Missouri River, I can testify that it's one of the most arduous trips that anyone can make on this continent and yet I had a power boat to do it in.
writing people liberty
I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with.
rivers personality grandfather
I have not been on any river that has more of a distinctive personality than does the Missouri River. It's a river that immediately presents to the traveler, 'I am a grandfather spirit. I have a source; I have a life.
garden eden cost
The negative cost of Lewis and Clark entering the Garden of Eden is that later expeditions regardless of what they were intended to do, later expeditions did not deal with the native peoples with the intelligence with the almost kindly resolve that Lewis and Clark did.
adventure two kind
There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't.
ideas migration facts
Spirit can go anywhere. In fact, it has to go places so it can change and emerge like in the migrations. That's the whole idea.
travel adventure easy
Be careful going in search of adventure - it's ridiculously easy to find.
stupid sleep men
At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion. But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid.
change blue color
On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing.
writing quests hunts
For me, writing is not a search for explanations but a ramble in quest of what informs a place, a hunt for equivalents.
land goodness american-history
To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.