I never find words right away. Poems for me always begin with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms, dances in the back of my mind.
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.
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.