shieldmaiden for the earth

...(My grandfather) told us boys a new story: he told us we would leave this place and go off to college. He only had an eighth-grade education, but that's the story he started telling, all about the things we could do if we only buckled down and kept at those books. It was a good story. So many of the other stories weren't working anymore, those ones other men told to their sons and grandsons, the ones about that good land along the river, about how some great-grandfather settled it way back when, about how it was hard going but they made it, about how even in the worst of times the land would see them hrough, about about how the land was theirs and had been theirs and would always be theirs - but then when their boys got ready to start working that land, turned to that land, it was gone. Where'd it go? Ask the Crow, the Northern Cheyenne, the Sioux. See, out West all the old mistakes are new, and many men, good men like Kevin Kincheloe, had to sit at their kitchen tables and watch through the front window as the bank's auctioneer walked their acres, selling everything - from combines to skinny cattle, selling it all right down to the dry grass: imagine it for a moment. Imagine everything you love of the world being taken from you. Now imagine it being taken from your child. 
...

We will fail, we will still act without good reason, we will always be burdened with failure and shame - but that, I think, is where things can change: There is a kind of awful and ready reverence that is some kin to fear but is not fear.  ... It is when we recognize how stories fail us and how stories save us. It is when we have heard them both and tell, in the moment of our greatest need, the story that will save us.
Like my grandfather. He knew and loved the way it had been, he saw the way it had to be. And always, even in the darkest of my days, my blood remembers his voice. I am here and mostly whole because of the stories he told me. We need to remember how it really was and is out West. And we need to tell those true, new stories.

From "Out West: Growing Up Hard", by Joe Wilkins, printed in Orion, Sep/Oct 2009, pp. 34-40.
 

...And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.
...
Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.