Burning the small dead branches broke from beneath thick spreading whitebark pine. A hundred summers snowmelt rock and air hiss in a twisted bough.
Spring-water in the green creek is clear Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white Silent knowledge – the spirit is enlightened of itself Contemplate the void: this world exceeds stillness.
We are, after all, an animal that was brought into being on this biosphere by these processes of sun and water and lead. And if we depart too far from them, we’re departing too far from the mother, from our heritage.
If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural credit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks.
But the poem was born elsewhere, and need not stay. Like the wild geese of the Arctic it heads home, far above the borders, where most things cannot cross.
Not long ago the forests were our depth, a sun-dappled underworld, an inexhaustible timeless source. Now they are vanishing.
Every boulder on a talus slope is different, no two needles on a fir tree are identical. How could one part be more central, more important, than any other?
A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness. The planet is a wild place and will always be.
The tribes were Berkeley, North Beach, Big Sur, Marin County, Los Angeles, and the host, Haight-Ashbury.
You must realize that these are abnormal times and there’s no way that any of us can keep ourselves pure.
In the Western Hemisphere we have only the tiniest number of buildings that can be called temples or shrines. The temples of our hemisphere will be some of the planet’s remaining wilderness areas.
There are paths that can be followed, and there is a path that cannot- it is not a path, it is the wilderness. There is a “going” but no goer, no destination, only the whole field.
The truly experienced person, the refined person, delights in the ordinary.
There are two things that are really educational. One is being with a bunch of really smart people. The other is being all by yourself.
We all receive, every day, the gifts of the Deep World, from the air we breathe to the food we eat.
What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.
I don’t think it would be apprpriate for a man to call himself a feminist.
If you have an understanding and cannot express it, then your understanding is not yet complete.
If we made such good use of animals, eating them, singing about them, drawing them, riding them, and dreaming about them, what do they get back from us?
Don’t imagine that we’re doing ecological politics to save the world. We’re doing ecological politics to save ourselves, to save our souls. It’s a personal exercise in character and in manners. It’s a matter of etiquette. It’s a matter of living right. It’s not that the planet requires us to be good to it. It’s that we must do it because it’s an aesthetic and ethical choice.
There is no sight moves me more than the jagged Olympics floating above the islands and inlets of Puget Sound.