I am the earth, even when I wake up crying. These are the earth’s tears – the ocean of suffering belongs to her. I am the earth speaking to you now, and you are the earth listening with your precious ears. I am the earth walking through my doubts and fears and hopes and dreams…
It is possible, I suppose that sometime we will learn everything there is to learn: what the world is, for example, and what it means. I think this as I am crossing from one field to another, in summer, and the mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either knows enough already or knows enough…
Wide enough to keep you looking Open enough to keep you moving Dry enough to keep you honest Prickly enough to make you tough Green enough to go on living Old enough to give you dreams by Gary Snyder A grateful earth poem by the “poet laureate of Deep Ecology” Gary Snyder, with the…
Eat bread and understand comfort. Drink water, and understand delight. Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds who are drinking the sweetness, who are thrillingly gluttonous. For one thing leads to another. Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot. Eventually tides will be the only calendar you…
I swear my way now will be to continue without plan or hope, to accept the drift of things, to shift from endless effort to joy in, say, that robin, plunging into the mossy shallows of my bird bath and splashing madly till the air shines with spray. Joy it will be, say, in Nancy,…
One day it’s the clouds, one day the mountains. One day the latest bloom of roses—the pure monochromes, the dazzling hybrids—inspiration for the cathedral’s round windows. Every now and then there’s the splendor of thought: the singular idea and its brilliant retinue— words, cadence, point of view, little gold arrows flitting between the lines. And…
Kingfisher: the colour-giver, fire-bringer, flame-flicker, river’s quiver. Ink-black bill, orange throat, and a quick blue back-gleaming feather-stream. Neat and still it sits on the snag of a stick, until with… Gold-flare, wing-fan, whipcrack the kingfisher – zingfisher, singfisher- Flashes down too fast to follow, quick and quicker carves its hollow In the water, slings its…