To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture.
Revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most ruthlessly exploited masses: animals, trees, water, air, grasses.
You should really know what the complete natural world of your region is and know what all its interactions are and how you are interacting with it yourself. This is just part of the work of becoming who you are, where you are.
In Western Civilization, our elders are books.
With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free.
Sometime in the last ten years the best brains of the Occident discovered to their amazement that we live in an Environment. This discovery has been forced on us by the realization that we are approaching the limits of something.
Gratitude to the Great Sky who holds billions of stars – and goes yet beyond that – beyond all powers, and thoughts and yet is within us – Grandfather Space. The Mind is his Wife.
The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.
There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.
All this new stuff goes on top turn it over, turn it over wait and water down from the dark bottom turn it inside out let it spread through Sift down even. Watch it sprout. A mind like compost.
Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.
Being the Stream Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream, so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies. Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally into it.
You don’t want to be victimized by your lesser talents.
Wildness is not just the “preservation of the world,” it is the world.
Zen aims at freedom but its practice is disciplined.
All those years and their moments – Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text.
Streams and mountains never stay the same.
Today we are aware as never before of the plurality of human life-styles and possibilities, while at the same time being tied, like in an old silent movie, to a runaway locomotive rushing headlong toward a very singular catastrophe.
Place and the scale of space must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities.
All that we did was human, stupid, easily forgiven, Not quite right.