Welcome! I am a contemplative thinker and photographer from Colorado. In this blog, you'll discover photographs that I've taken on my hiking and backpacking trips, mostly in the American West. I've paired these with my favorite inspirational and philosophical quotes - literary passages that emphasize the innate spirituality of the natural world. I hope you enjoy them!

If you'd like to purchase photo-quote greeting cards, please go to www.NaturePhoto-QuoteCards.com .


In the Spirit of Wildness,

Stephen Hatch
Fort Collins, Colorado

P.S. There's a label index at the bottom of the blog.

Friday, January 3, 2014

We must stay connected to the Earth, and not let our BEING be mined!


"How bad can you make yourself feel through your fears, your doubts, and your insecurities? You can sit around feeling powerless, but this deal about being powerless or feeling powerless is all a lie. We have power. It is perpetual. We constantly have power, and we're constantly using it or it's being misused . . . But our intelligence and the power of our intelligence have been put into a box. We've been programmed to BELIEVE; we have not been taught to THINK. What happened to us, to the Native Peoples on this hemisphere, happened to your [European] tribes, to all peoples. You're descendents of tribes and it happened to your tribes; it just happened to your tribes before you got here. And then when you got here, you did to us what they had done to you. All of that was done to change your tribal perception of reality; to change and alter the spiritual perception of reality and turn it into a religious perception of reality, because there's a difference between spiritual and religious. Religious is about submission and obedience and authoritarianism. Spiritual is about taking responsibility. We have to look at this; submission is not taking responsibility. It is an easy, convenient OUT that they programmed into us . . . They wanted us to believe that there was something wrong with us and that we had to obey them. This was the gig they ran on the tribes of Europe and the descendents of the tribes of Europe and they ran it here. But it was about altering our perception of reality from a spiritual perception of reality into a MINING perception of reality. The mining tools became religion and government and politics and racism and sexism and all of these other divisive things. Mining tools are not who we are. We are human beings - our bone, flesh, and blood are made up of the earth. We have BEING that is is our spirit, our energy, and our essence. All things of the earth are made up of the same thing. All things of the earth have BEING . . . They take the BEING part of humanity and mine the BEING part of humanity through how they program us to perceive reality. They then take that and they turn that into fuel to run this system that we're in. This is the gig that goes on all the time. But to be a human being, we have to connect to the reality of our relationship to power, to the earth, and to our original instructions."

John Trudell,
Dakota Sioux activist, musician and author

Photo: Avalanche Lilies and Tolmie Peak, Mt. Rainier National Park, WA; July 29, 2013

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