Will be but corpses dressed in frocks, who cannot speak to birds or rocks.
I don’t know of any other city where you can walk through so many culturally diverse neighborhoods, and you’re never out of sight of the wild hills. Nature is very close here.
Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.
I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness America your stupidity. I could almost love you again.
I thought, that day I started, I sure would hate to do this all my life, And dammit, that’s just what I’ve gone and done.
Forests in the tropics are cut to make pasture to raise beef for the American market. Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable, and distinctly more ignorant.
Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged?
In the 40,000 year time scale we’re all the same people. We’re all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.
I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ’em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.
The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us.
The wild-often dismissed as savage and chaotic by “civilized” thinkers, is actually impartially, relentlessly, and beautifully formal and free. Its expression-the richness of plant and animal life on the globe including us, the rainstorms, windstorms, and calm spring mornings-is the real world, to which we belong.
They should listen to the unsaid words that resonate around the edge of the poem.
Deer love mushrooms.
Clarity, especially in poetry, requires conceiving of your work as a collaborative act of imagination with the audience, thus affording them the deepest respect.
Goal: Clean air, clean clear-running rivers, the presence of Pelican and Osprey and Gray Whale in our lives; salmon and trout in our streams; unmuddied language and good dreams.
White clouds gather and billow. Thin grass does for a mattress, The blue sky makes a good quilt. Happy with a stone underhead Let heaven and earth go about their changes.
Each time you go that road it gets more straight.
Though the nation is lost, the mountains and rivers remain” – Tu Fu.
Like imagination and the body, language rises unbidden.
A community needs it’s elders to continue. Just as you could not grow culture out of a population of kindergarten children, a forest cannot realize its own natural potential without the seed-reservoirs, root-fungus threads, birdcalls and magical deposits of tiny feces that are the gift from the old to the young. Chris Maser says, “We need ancient forests for the survival of ancient forests.