From ARCTIC DREAMS, by Barry Lopez:
A Lakota woman named Elaine Jahner once wrote that what lies at the heart of the relligion of hunting peoples is the notion that a spiritual landscape exists within the phyical landscape. To put it another way, occasionally one sees something fleeting in the land, a moment when line, color, and movement intensify and something sacred is revealed, leading one to believe that there is another realm of reality corresponding to the physical one but different.
In the face of a rational, scientific approach to the land, which is more widely sanctioned, esoteric insights and speculations are frequently overshadowed, and what is lost is profound. The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.
No comments:
Post a Comment