Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her wonderful book, Braiding Sweetgrass, “Many Indigenous peoples share the understanding that we are each endowed with a particular gift, a unique ability. . . . It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility. . . . Asking what is our responsibility is perhaps also to ask, ‘What is our gift? And how do we use it?’ . . . Language is our [human] gift and our responsibility.”–Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Milkweed Editions, Canada 2013: pg. 147

Being a photographer–even an amateurish photographer–the composition of images is the language with which I am more and more comfortable, even gifted. And, the responsibility: to compose images in such as way as to speak to and for the land, walking and crawling creatures, waters and swimming things, and the air with its winged beauties. And sometimes it is to cry for world being destroyed before our very eyes, so that as Kimmerer writes, “we may love it back to wholeness again.” Ibid: pg. 359.

George A. Gilland