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I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.

Terry Tempest Williams

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Terry Tempest Williams
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 8
Author
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
Poet
Writer
Corona
California
Ends
Pray
Love
Praying
Bird
Listen
Prayer
Teach
Prayers
Rather
Remind
Fear
Birds

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If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.
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The moment Eve bit into the apple, her eyes opened and she became free. She exposed the truth of what every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal.
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It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak of her relationship to these beings for 20 years.
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I accept the Organic Trinity of Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal with as much authority as I accept the Holy Trinity. Both are sacred.
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The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit.
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I write from the place of inquiry. The first draft is a discovery period to see what I know and what I don't know. My task is simply to follow the words. There are surprises along the way. I just have to get it down. Call it the sculptor's clay.
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Downwinders, meaning those people, individuals, communities that were downwind of the nuclear test site. During those years when we were testing atomic bombs above ground, when we watched them for entertainment from the roofs of our high schools, little did we know what was raining down on us, little did we know what would appear years later.
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For me, it always comes back to the land, respecting the land, the wildlife, the plants, the rivers, mountains, and deserts, the absolute essential bedrock of our lives. This is the source of where my power lies, the source of where all our power lies.
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How do we remain faithful to our own spiritual imagination and not betray what we know in our own bodies? The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.
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Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand. Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation -- teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience.
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I come from a culture that embodies the need to convert others to the truth. The Mormon Church has one of the largest missionary programs in the world. That does not interest me.
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To hear something asks very little of us. To listen places our entire being on notice.
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Democracy is an insecure landscape.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there may be no such thing -- faith is the belief in our capacity to create meaningful lives.
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I feel like we are at a time of great creativity if we choose to embrace it as such, if we choose to engage the will of our imaginations and imagine another way of being in the world.
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Revolution is not something outside of us, but inside us, begging for our engagement every single day.
Terry Tempest Williams
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What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart.
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Whatever artistry may occur within the manuscript, the magic happens for me in the last draft. Whatever I have been resistant to say must finally be said. In the end, I see where my pencil has been leading me.
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When one of us says 'look, there is nothing out there,' what we are really saying is, 'I cannot see'.
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I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.
Terry Tempest Williams