Earth Knowledge

Here is what I have realized: if you learn to make fire with nothing but what the forest provides, and you purify water in bowls you yourself have carved, and you spend the night warmly wrapped in a house of fallen hemlock needles, and if you find cattail roots and salmonberries for your dinner among the streamside plants, and if you do all this with maybe only a knife, or a sharpened stone; then you have traded comfort for freedom, and, in return, you have found that all the world is your home.