It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter there seems nothing more than…
Though the air is full of singing my head is loud with the labor of words. Though the season is rich with fruit, my tongue hungers for the sweet of speech. Though the beech is golden I cannot stand beside it mute, but must say ‘It is golden,’ while the leaves stir and fall with…
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…
That day I saw beneath dark clouds, the passing light over the water and I heard the voice of the world speak out, I knew then, as I had before, life is no passing memory of what has been nor the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read. It is the opening…
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may…
Do you know how the caterpillar turns? Do you remember what happens inside a cocoon? You liquefy. There in the thick black of your self-spun womb, void as the moon before waxing, you melt (as Christ did for three days in the tomb) conceiving in impossible darkness the sheer inevitability of wings. Kim Rosen …
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…
We plant seeds in the ground And dreams in the sky, Hoping that, someday, the roots of one Will meet the upstretched limbs of the other. It has not happened yet. We share the sky, all of us, the whole world: Together, we are a tribe of eyes that look upward, Even as we stand…
There is nothing more innocent than the still-unformed creature I find beneath the soil, neither of us knowing what it will become in the abundance of the planet. It makes a living only by remaining still in its niche. One day it might struggle out of its tender pearl of blind skin with a wing…