Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

Linda Hogan

Listening to a Deeper Way

Topic: Life Beyond Death & the Spirit World

Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or heart coming from. the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body. Another time, there was the booming voice of an ocean storm thundering from far out at sea, telling about what lived in the distance, about the rough water that would arrive, wave after wave revealing the disturbance at center.

“Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above them.

“Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark, considering snow. On the dry, red road, I pass the place of the sunflower, that dark and secret location where creation took place. I wonder if it will return this summer, if it will multiply and move up to the other stand of flowers in a territorial struggle.

“It’s winter and there is smoke from the fires. The square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

Linda Hogan

Linda Hogan was born on July 16, 1947, in Denver, Colorado, United States, to Charles C. Henderson, a Chickasaw, and Cleona Florine Bower, of white descent. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and completed a Master of Arts in English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Boulder.

A Chickasaw writer working across poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, Linda Hogan is known for exploring spiritual and ecological themes. Her books include Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir, and, with Brenda Peterson, Sightings: The Mysterious Journey of the Gray Whale. She wrote the script for Everything Has a Spirit, a PBS documentary on American Indian Religious Freedom. Her novel Mean Spirit was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won an Oklahoma Book Award.

Linda Hogan has served as faculty at the Indian Arts Institute, as Writer in Residence for the Chickasaw Nation, and is Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado. In 2007, she was inducted into the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame for her contributions to Indigenous literature. She continues to speak and write publicly, offering work that draws from both personal experience and collective memory.

(b. 1947) Native American Religions
Dwellings

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. Norton, 2007, [Linda Hogan, Chickasaw, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World].

Linda Hogan

Theme: Life Beyond Death

About This Linda Hogan Quotation [Commentary]

In Linda Hogan’s words, “Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands,” listening becomes a form of deep belonging. Her steps are not solitary. With each movement, she becomes aware of those who came before, whose presence offers not only comfort but instruction: to stop, to observe, to receive. This experience is not framed in symbolic terms—it is direct. “Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me.” Their presence is real, and the love that shaped her life remains active. In Hogan’s way of seeing, the boundary between past and present is porous. The path forward depends on stillness, attention, and the willingness to listen to what endures.

The wider passage frames this experience in a winter landscape: “It’s winter and there is smoke from the fires. The square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over.” The quiet season becomes one of “elemental attention,” where perception sharpens and things work together. In this setting, Hogan listens “to what speaks in the blood.” She names the land itself as sacred: “Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another.” These are not distant deities but active presences within the world’s harsh and beautiful realities. Her way of walking becomes an act of attunement—not only to the land, but to the voices of the unseen. “Walking, I am listening to a deeper way.” This deeper way arises from the confluence of place, memory, and motion.

Read in the light of life beyond death, Hogan’s words are steady and clear. Her ancestors are not gone—they are behind her, instructing her to “Be still… Watch and listen.” Their love did not end with their lives. She is “the result of the love of thousands,” and that love is not abstract. It is embodied, it speaks through blood and memory, and it continues in motion. The quiet command she hears—be still, watch, listen—is not nostalgic but alive. In this listening, she enters a space where presence and ancestry meet.

Linda Hogan, Chickasaw

Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) Former Faculty at Indian Arts Institute, Writer in Residence for The Chickasaw Nation, and Professor Emerita from the University of Colorado, is an internationally recognized public reader, speaker, and writer of poetry, fiction, and essays.

Hogan’s nonfiction includes a respected collection of essays; Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World; and The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. In addition, she has, with Brenda Peterson, written Sightings, The Mysterious Journey of the Gray Whale for National Geographic Books, and edited several anthologies on nature and spirituality. She wrote the script, Everything Has a Spirit, a PBS documentary on American Indian Religious Freedom.

Hogan was inducted into the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame in 2007 for her contributions to indigenous literature.

―Linda Hogan website [Linda Hogan, Chickasaw, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World].

Dwellings: a Spiritual History of the Living World

“People, animals, land―the alive and conscious world―populate Dwellings in this exploration of the human place within the world. I write out of respect for the natural world, recognizing that humankind is not separate from nature. Some of this work connects the small world of humans with the larger universe, containing us in the same way that native ceremonies do, showing us both our place and a way of seeing.

These are lessons learned from the land and it is my hope that this work contributes to an expanded vision of the world. Dwellings is both of and about this alive and conscious world. Its pages come from forests, its words spring from the giving earth.”

―Linda Hogan [Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World].

Additional Linda Hogan Quotes

“Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time, and perhaps that stewardship is finally our place in the web of life, our work, the solution to the mystery that we are. There are already so many holes in the universe that will never again be filled, and each of them forces us to question why we permitted such loss, such tearing away at the fabric of life, and how we will live with our planet in the future.”

―Linda Hogan [Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World].

“Sometimes there is a wellspring or river of something beautiful and possible in the tenderest sense that comes to and from the most broken of children, and I was one of these, and whatever is was, I can’t name, I can only thank. Perhaps it is the water of life that saves us, after all.”

―Linda Hogan [The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir].

“Stories are for people what water is for plants.”

―Linda Hogan [Power].

“A woman once described a friend of hers as being such a keen listener that even the trees leaned toward her, as if they were speaking their innermost secrets into her listening ears. Over the years I’ve envisioned that woman’s silence, a hearing full and open enough that the world told her its stories. The green leaves turned toward her, whispering tales of soft breezes and the murmurs of leaf against leaf.”

―Linda Hogan [Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World].

“Perhaps there are events and things that work as a doorway into a mythical world, the world of first people, all the way back to the creation of the universe and the small quickenings of earth, the first stirrings of human beings at the beginnings of time. Our elders believe this to be so, that it is possible to wind a way backwards to the start of things, and in doing so find a form of sacred reason, different from ordinary reason, that is linked to forces of nature. In this kind of mind, like in the feather, is the power of sky and thunder and sun, and many have had alliances and partnerships with it, a way of thought older than measured time, less primitive than the rational present. Others have tried for centuries to understand the world by science and intellect but have not yet done so, not yet understood animals, finite earth, or even their own minds and behavior. The more they seek to learn the world, the closer they come to the spiritual, the magical origins of creation.

There is a still place, a gap between the worlds, spoken by the tribal knowings of thousands of years. In it are silent flyings that stand aside from human struggles and the designs of our own makings. At times, when we are silent enough, still enough, we take a step into such mystery, the place of spirit, and mystery, we must remember, by its very nature does not wish to be known.”

―Linda Hogan [Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World].

“The real ceremony begins where the formal one ends, when we take up a new way, our minds and hearts filled with the vision of earth that holds us within it, in compassionate relationship to and with our world.”

―Linda Hogan

“Not only are there before and after, but there are also beginnings and returns. Not only is there the creation of the humans, formed of corn or clay, with a breath of wind or a god, but there are mythic destinies. Sometimes myth is formed by the body and what happens to it, especially in the realm of pain, depth, and birth. Phantoms of generations past are in our bodies. These explain us to ourselves.”

―Linda Hogan [The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir].

Listening to a Deeper Way

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