There's a narrow strip of beach on the outer rim of the wilderness sand dunes in Oregon that is part of me and my family. The sound of the surf there reminds me of the winter when we caught crabs with our bare hands and discovered they were females and let them go. The smell of the air reminds me of my daughter sitting in the beach grass, leaning against her father's back. When I go back to that beach, I remember this. I am this.
Environmental destruction is a kind of self-destruction.
If we go around systematically destroying the places that hold meaning for us, that hold our memories, then we become fragmented and don't have a sense of who we are. You can walk alongside the river of your life, living out your little separate timeline, or you can plunge right in, immerse yourself. One of my colleagues says that, if there is eternal life, it isn't found in the length of one's life, but in its depth. That makes sense to me. I have no doubt that each life has a definite limit, an endpoint, but I don't think there is any limit to the potential depth of each moment, and I try to live in a way that reaches into those depths.