Good Morning!
It has been quite a morning. I began by reading Totem Salmon by Freeman House. It is a book so tragic I can only read a little bit at a time.
Somehow even in growing up in Iowa, I tasted fresh, or maybe frozen salmon, and though I was a picky eater at the time, fell in love with that pink flesh. I think now it may have been the wildness, the knowingness of a fish that starts in a stream, goes out and explores the ocean, and then, returns to the same stream. If fresh local salmon is on the menu, I order it. If I see it in the store, I buy it. Of course that won't be happening this year, and maybe never again. I feel the loss in my own flesh, the need to ingest and make my own what I admire so much.
I could take many quotes from this book but because I was speaking of language, I choose this.
Oh, the book keeps opening to what I posted before. It is worth a repeat. "How can salmon be endangered when you can buy them in cans in supermarkets?" asked Idaho Congressional Representative Helen Chenowith in 1996. Ack!
When Peter Berg interviewed ecologist Sterling Bunnel, Mr. Bunnel said the following:
"Most of the day tends to come through in terms of a kind of spontaneous mental image. So that if you're living in an area with a certain type of landscape and a certain kind of patterning, your mind is going to run to certain kinds of patterns.... almost programmed by the kind of input you're getting. Actually you find that there's a tremendous correspondence between different kinds of geological formation, something you can see down at the mountain. Look up on the mountain and different strata of rock are diagrammed by different types of bushes growing. You can see it."
Oh, wow!! I love that. I suppose it is why we need to go to the desert to clear our thoughts. Sometimes certain landscapes are too much. It is why I love the ocean air. I feel my head clear.
I love my own personal landscape. I look out on a gentle roll of hill, a lovely fall of trees, and, at the top, in one place grassland with a few decorative trees and a trail. My mind patterns there. I love my view.
Ah, maybe that is enough to say for now. My mind says rest in the beauty of nature's climb, for now.