"Cross Creek" by Marjorie Kinnans Rawlings

 

A sharing of a favorite piece of writing of mine on the Nature of Our Great and Beloved Mother...

"If there can be such a thing as instinctual memory, the consciousness of land and water lie deeper in the core of us than any knowledge of our fellow beings.

We were bred of earth before we were born of our mothers. Once born, we can live without mother or father, or any other kin, or any friend,

or any human love. We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shriveled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men...

I had become a part of Cross Creek. I was more than a writer...I was a part of the earth. Who owns Cross Creek? The red-birds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages..It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed, but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers, and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time..."

~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, "Cross Creek"