The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 316

We were immemorially people of the countryside, far from the courts of princes, living according to rituals we didn't always understand and yet were unwilling to dishonour because that would cut us off from the past, the sacred earth, the gods. Those earth rites went back far. They would always have been partly mysterious. But we couldn't surrender to them now. We had become self-aware. We would have accepted; we would have felt ourselves to be more whole, more in tune with the land and the spirit of the earth.