Jeanean Gendron, Your Shasta County Real Estate Specialist: Pondering Good Things and Life - The River Why Excerpt....

As I ponder those things that are dear in life and have moved my spirit, I return to things that I love. I awoke to books when I was 12 and have never lost my love for reading a fine book. They are like good friends and never grow tiresome. Over time they grow in value and trust. Recently having had an awakening moment about friendship and business, I have returned to that which comforts me and reassures me that I know myself.

....A native is a man or creature or plant indigenous to a limited geographical area--a space boundaried and defined by mountains, rivers or coastline (not by latitudes, longitudes or state and county lines), with its own peculiar mixture of weeds, trees, bugs, birds, flowers, streams, hills, rocks and critters (including people), its own nuances of rain, wind and seasonal change. Native intelligence develops through an unspoken or soft-spoken relationship with these interwoven things: it evolves as the native involves himself in his region. A non-native awakes in the morning in a body in a bed in a room in a building on a street in a county in a state in a nation. A native awakes in the center of a little cosmos--or a big one, if his intelligence is vast--and he wears this cosmos like a robe, sensing the barely perceptible shiftings, migrations, moods, and machinations of it creatures, its growing green things, its earth and sky. Native intelligence is what Huck Finn had rafting the Mississippi, what Thoreau had by his pond, what Kerouac had in Desolation Lookout and lost entirely the instant he caught a wiff of any city. But some have it in cities--like the Artful Dodger, picking his way through a crowd of London pockets; like Mother Teresa in the Calcutta slums, Sissy Hankshaw had it on freeways, Woody Guthrie in crowds of fruit pickers, Gandhi in jails. Almost everybody has a dab of it wherever he or she feels most at home--like H2O in his tweeds at a hall full o fly-dabbling purists. But the high-grade stuff is, I think, found most often where the earth, air, fire and water have been least bamboozled by men and machines. In the scrub desert of Eastern Oregon, or along any river.....

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The River Why, David James Duncan

I am Jeanean Gendron, your Redding and Shasta County Specialist. You can reach me at 530 276-7417. I answer my phone.