Medicine Creek

Medicine Park, Oklahoma

“Thank you for the river and what it says.  It doesn’t matter which one.  Whether it’s a trickle or a rush, they each say the same thing, and I’m beginning to believe that it may be everything – the high of the water’s joy, that stifled cry of the earth’s wet hot desire to go on living.”

            -from “What the River Says” by Nathan Brown

Comanche and Kiowa country

Wichita Mountains, Oklahoma

“I am richer than Santana the Kiowa chief if you subtract those millions of verdant acres which we did.”

            -from “Hello Walls” by Jim Harrison

Rainbow Trout

Medicine Creek

“There’s enough in a river to bleed out anything.”

            -from “On the Wabash” by Henry Hughes   

Medicine Creek

Medicine Park, Oklahoma

“There is an eight-foot piece of raw bamboo across my lap soon to become a split cane fly rod.  It will be a totem or temple or another limb anchored to the heart of whoever holds it with a line drawn deep into the clean water it reaches toward.”

            -from “Letters From a Lost Creek” by Jimmy Watts

Echinocereus reichenbachii

Wichita Mountains, Oklahoma

“This capacity to wonder at trifles – no matter the imminent peril – these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.”

            -Vladimir Nobokov

Medicine Park, Oklahoma

“How miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature.  There were eternities during which it did not exist.  And when it is all over . . . nothing will have happened.  For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life.”

            -Friedrick Nietzsche

Wichita Mountains, Oklahoma

“ . . . about the Native American situation, he said everything’s a matter of time, that though it’s small comfort the ghosts have already nearly destroyed us with the ugliness we’ve become, that in a few hidden glades in North America half-human bears still dance in imperfect circles.”

            -from “After Ikkyu” by Jim Harrison

Medicine Creek

“What is living but to grow smaller, undress another skin or scale away rough edges the way rivers cut mountains down to the heart . . . We know the history of sand.  We know water and air trying to break the spirit of stone.  We know our teeth grinding down to their pith.”

            -from “Fishing” by Linda Hogan

Loretta

“The sixteenth-century Korean poet, Song Chong-Win, says the best way to understand how to live is to ‘fish without catching any.’”

            -from The Art of Angling: Poems About Fishing, edited by Henry Hughes