Shepard for the Day.8

Cahuilla basket bowl, south central California

"In such a world there is no wildness, as there is no tameness.  Human power over nature is largely the exercise of handcraft.  Insofar as the natural world poetically signifies human society, it signals that there is no great power over other men except as the skills of leadership are hewn by example and persuasion.

The otherness of nature takes fabulous forms of incorporation, influence, conciliation, and compromise. When the juvenile goes out with adults to seek a hidden root or to stalk an antelope he sees the unlimited possibilities of affiliation, for success is understood to depend on the readiness of the prey or tuber as much as the skill of the forager."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
p8