If you belonged to the Ojibwa or some other rooted people, when you returned from a long and perilous journey, your family and neighbors would ask if you learned a new song, met a new animal, come upon a healing herb or a source of food or a holy place. What vision had you brought back for the community? The prime reason for traveling, after all, was to enrich the life at home.
"What did you find?" my father would ask when I returned from a camping trip or an after-dinner stroll. And I would show him a fossil or feather, tell him how the sun lit up the leaves of a hickory, how a skunk looked me over; I would recall for him the taste of elderberries or the rush of wind in the white pines or the crunch of locust shells underfoot. Only in the sharing of what I had found was the journey completed, the circle closed.
— Scott Russell Sanders, Writing from the Center