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gives people radiation poisoning because the uranium does not like to be above ground. It wants to remain far beneath the surface of the earth. Whether we view this statement as literal truth or metaphor, the lesson is the same: digging up uranium makes you sick.
    But to view this metaphorically is to still to perceive the world anthropocentrically. In this case the metaphorical view expresses concern for the people poisoned by uranium. The Diné man's observation, on the other hand, is a comment on the importance of maintaining the order of things.
    I told Jeannette about this, then sat silent while I considered a pair of conversations I'd previously engaged in, one a couple of years before, and one much more recently. In the former conversation I'd been sitting on the floor of my living room, speaking with a scientist friend of mine who insisted that the scientific method—whereby an observer develops a hypothesis, then gathers data to rigorously test its feasibility—is in fact the only way we learn. One of my cats walked into the room, and my friend said, "Hypothesis: Cats purr when you pet them." She scratched her finger on the carpet, and the cat trotted over to her. She ran her hand along the cat's back. The cat purred. "Hypothesis supported," she said. "Sample size, one. Where's another cat?"
    I knew I disagreed, but it took me a while to articulate my reason. Finally I said that whether we are electrifying a kitten or petting a cat, if the purpose is specifically to collect data we're still objectifying the cat. "What if," I said, "I pet her because I like to, and because I know she likes it? I can still pay attention, and I can still learn from the relationship. That's what happens with my other friends. Why not with the cat, too? But t he point is pursuing a relationship, not gathering information."
    She hesitated, looping strands of hair around her index finger, as she often does when she contemplates something, and then she said, "I guess that would change the whole notion of what knowledge is, and how we get it."
    I nodded. The cat, for her part, reached up on her hind legs to push her head against my friends arm. Absentmindedly, my friend stroked the cats back.
    The other conversation was shorter, but then trees can be rather taciturn. I was walking the dirt road that leads to my mailbox, which intersects with a paved road. I noticed an old pine tree just on the corner, as I had noticed it many times previous, and I thought, "That tree is doing very well."
    Immediately I heard a response that did not pass through my ear but went directly to the part of my brain that receives sounds. I heard a completion of my sentence that changed its meaning altogether: "For not being in a community." I looked around, and though there were other trees nearby, this was not a full tree community. The tree's nearest neighbors included the mailboxes and a telephone pole coated with faded creosote. I began to think about this lack of community, and from there began to think of all the times I had moved, from Nebraska to Maine and back to Nebraska, then Montana, to Colorado for college, Nevada, California, months spent living in my truck, back to Nevada, Idaho, Washington. I thought about the people I had left behind, my grandmother, my brothers, one sister and then another, friends. The irrigation ditch behind my old house. The aspen trees outside the front window, the Russian olives, the immense anthills in the pasture. These were my associations, not what I heard the tree "say." That's the crucial difference. The tree merely expressed one phrase. Everything else came afterward. Try it yourself. Listen to someone, and pay attention to where your thoughts take you. It actually feels different to hear than to think.
    I told Jeannette about these two conversations. We talked some more, about the river, about her activism and my own, about what it will take for humans to survive. As we talked, a mosquito buzzed around her lace, then