......................................................................................................................................................... In the middle of the night I awoke with this dream: After I slipped on some stones and brused a foot, the doctor said, "The stones need time to heal." In knowledgeable hands, "certain stones represent in the most tangible form the spiritual energy of dreams and visions manifesting themselves in the physical world." Gaston Bachelard wrote: "For the dreamer, mineral outcroppings that reveal themselves in the light of day tend to become mere forms that have ceased to grow, inert and cold. But, deep in the mine, the future, with all its privileges and all its possibilities, is theirs." [Earth and Reveries of Will. Dallas, 2002.] Now our extra-ordinary capacity to imagine is performing lobotomies on earth's mineral being. Mountaintops are lopped off; "entire communities drown in waves of toxic sludge that burst free from containment ponds. Mines collapse, miners entombed within." "-- and of wilderness and of wild places I would never see landforms and wilderness, and desert, and stone, you and cliff, cave, vast, continuous, and remote." Where are the priests of Cybele while the goddess of mountains and mines is fracked the Hopis had held a rain dance Sunday, calling on the clouds— their ancestors — to restore the water blessing to the land. Perhaps the kachinas had listened to their Hopi children. Perhaps not. It was not a Navajo concept, the idea of adjusting nature with ejaculated toxic fluids? Groundwise, from around the world tons hydrocarbons rise to where gods who've ascended for thousands of years now dangle from a deadly aura. ......................................................................................................................................................... certian stones: V. Deloria, Jr., C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions. New Orleans, 2009. entire communities: EFFY Media Team, "Review: The Last Mountain." Sage Magazine, April 12, 2012. and of wilderness: A. Sondheim. From, "stars burn ice-cold and ferocious." the Hopis: T. Hillerman, Listening Woman. New York, 1978.