If we listen to the land ...

 "If we listen to the land, we will know what to do." (i)

Here, I believe, listening is a metaphor for communicating with and paying attention to nature. I can support this through observation. Watch an animal; any animal; and you will notice them occasionally stop and hold very still. It is as though they are intently listening and concentrating. Actually they are. Having not declared themselves superior to Ishki Yakni; Mother Earth, nature; they have not forsaken the wonderful life-saving, life-sustaining ability to communicate with and receive guidance from Ishki Yakni. As a result they stand very still and Ishki Yakni warns them of danger, directs their course to food and shelter, tells them when and where to find a mate or prepare for winter and tells them when to take shelter from a storm. Humans just stand there looking clueless because some equally clueless person around 6,000 years ago decided that having the ability to abstract makes us better than the creator - nature. This is the evidence that truth is often lucky to survive the hour while an ignorant statement, made by an equally ignorant person, can survive for millennium. We are our own worst enemy.
It isn't that Ishki Yakni won't communicate with us. We have stopped our ears and filled our minds with delusions of grandeur and superiority to the point that we can't hear Ishki Yakni speaking to us. Actually, recently, Ishki Yakni has been screaming at us, but we are too full of ourselves and our delusions of superiority to hear.
FOOTNOTE:
(i) Williams, Terry Tempest. (2004). The Open Space of Democracy. Wipf and Stock Publishers. Eugene, OR. p. 35



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