The best thing you can do for the planet is to stay home.
A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves.
You run into people who want to write poetry who don’t want to read anything in the tradition. That’s like wanting to be a builder but not finding out what different kinds of wood you use.
Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics.
Knowing where and who are intimately linked.
Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place.
My Grandmother standing wordless fifteen minutes Between rows of loganberries, clippers poised in her hand.
Grandfather Space. The Mind is his Wife.
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.