if you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places

  

.

To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. 

At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.
 

―N. Scott Momaday

.

Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine … and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine …’

—W.B. Yeats

.

I believe in going back to the magic of the earth and the lake, the sky and the universe. That kind of magic. 

I believe in that kind of religion. A religion of the rocks, the lake, the water, the sky. Yes, that’s what I believe in.
 

—George Morrison, Grand Portage Ojibwe

.