True affluence is to not need anything.

True affluence is not needing anything.

Grandfather Space. The Mind is his Wife

stay together learn the flowers go light

Thought is just an apprehension of touch.

Streams and mountains never stay the same.

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

Knowing where and who are intimately linked.

In Western Civilization, our elders are books.

Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics

To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture

Zen aims at freedom but its practice is disciplined.

When making an axe handle the pattern is not far off.

You don't want to be victimized by your lesser talents.

The best thing you can do for the planet is to stay home.

When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.

Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.

Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place.

The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.

All that we did was human, stupid, easily forgiven, Not quite right.

Wildness is not just the "preservation of the world," it is the world

O, ah! The awareness of emptiness brings forth a heart of compassion!

Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.

Will be but corpses dressed in frocks, who cannot speak to birds or rocks.

A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves.

Range after range of mountains. Year after year after year. I am still in love.

After weeks of watching the roof leak I fixed it tonight by moving a single board

With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free.

A reading is a kind of communion. The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe.

Place and the scale of space must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities.

The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.

Clouds sink down the hills Coffee is hot again. The dog Turns and turns about, stops and sleeps.

Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.

The other side of the "sacred" is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.

My Grandmother standing wordless fifteen minutes Between rows of loganberries, clippers poised in her hand.

Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged?

Wildness It is perennially within us, dormant as a hard-shelled seed, awaiting the fire or flood that awakes it 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.

Revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most ruthlessly exploited masses: animals, trees, water, air, grasses

The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void.

If, after obtaining Buddhahood, anyone in my land gets tossed in jail on a vagrancy rap, may I not attain highest perfect enlightenment.

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.

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.

Burning the small dead branches broke from beneath thick spreading whitebark pine. A hundred summers snowmelt rock and air hiss in a twisted bough.

I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

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.

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.

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 pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island, and to the beings who thereon dwell one ecosystem in diversity under the sun With joyful interpenetratio n for all.

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance beween spirit and humility.

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