Ralph Emerson "Nature" (1836)

"Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without

having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect

exhilaration, I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as

the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is

perpetual youth...Standing on the bare ground,-my head bathed in the blithe air, and uplifted

into infinite space,-all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing;

I see all.."

- Ralph Emerson 1836

Concept: deified transcendence

Each and All

...All are needed by each one;

Nothing is fair or good alone.

I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,

Singing at dawn on the alder bough;

I brought him home, in his nest, at even;

He sings the song, but it pleases not now,

For I did not bring home the river and sky; —

He sang to my ear, — they sang to my eye.

The delicate shells lay on the shore;

The bubbles of the latest wave

Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;

And the bellowing of the savage sea

Greeted their safe escape to me.

I wiped away the weeds and foam,

I fetched my sea-born treasures home;

But the poor, unsightly, noisome things

Had left their beauty on the shore,

With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

The lover watched his graceful maid,

As 'mid the virgin train she stayed,

Nor knew her beauty's best attire

Was woven still by the snow-white choir.

At last she came to his hermitage,

Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage; —

The gay enchantment was undone,

A gentle wife, but fairy none.

Then I said, "I covet truth;

Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;

I leave it behind with the games of youth:" —

As I spoke, beneath my feet

The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,

Running over the club-moss burrs;

I inhaled the violet's breath;

Around me stood the oaks and firs;

Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;

Over me soared the eternal sky,

Full of light and of deity;

Again I saw, again I heard,

The rolling river, the morning bird; —

Beauty through my senses stole;

I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

-Ralph Emerson

Message of the poem:

Image:

Connotative word:

Alliteration:

Dramatic Irony: "I covet truth;

Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;

I leave it behind with the games of youth:"

Romantic Concept: Transcendence: "ability to elevate one's consciousness through perceiving great power and spirt in nature"

concept: gaia theory= earth as an ecosystem / ecological and spiritual connectivity

The Rhodora : On being asked, whence is the flower.

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,

Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,

To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

The purple petals fallen in the pool

Made the black water with their beauty gay;

Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,

And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,

Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask; I never knew;

But in my simple ignorance suppose

The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.

-Ralph Emerson

HENRY THOREAU WALDEN (1854):

"Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows

which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness- to wade sometimes in marshes

where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to

smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her

nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we

are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and

unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us

because unfathomable.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of

inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the

wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain

which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits

transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered

when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens

us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the

hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way,

especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the

strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this."

-Henry Thoreau Walden (1854)

Concept: ecocentrism

"This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and

come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt-

sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are

unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whip-poor-will is borne

on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away

my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the evening wind

are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the mind still blows and roars in

the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never complete.

The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields

and woods without fear. They are Nature's watchmen- links which connect the days of animated life.

The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature- of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter- such

health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be

affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the

woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall

I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?"

-Henry Thoreau 1854

Concept: organic transcendence

Piute Creek

One granite ridge

A tree would be enough

Or even a rock, a small creek,

A bark shred in a pool.

Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted

Tough trees crammed

In thin stone fractures

A huge moon on it all, is too much.

The mind wanders. A million

Summers, night air still and the rocks

Warm. Sky over endless mountains.

All the junk that goes with being human

Drops away, hard rock wavers

Even the heavy present seems to fail

This bubble of a heart

Cold proud eyes

Words and books

Like a small creek of a small ledge

Gone in the dry air.

A clear, attentive mind

Has no meaning but that

Which sees is truly seen.

No one loves rock yet we are here.

Night chills. A flick

In the moonlight

Slips into shadow:

Back there unseen

Of Cougar or Coyote

Watch me rise and go.

-Gary Snyder No Nature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Burning the Small Dead

Burning the small dead

branches

broke from beneath

thick spreading

whitebark pine

a hundred summers

snowmelt rock and air

hiss in a twisted bough.

sierra granite;

Mt. Ritter-

black rock twice as old.

Deneb, Altair

windy fire

Concept: ecocentrism via organic transcendence

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me

and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting for their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Concept: ecocentrism via organic transcendence

"Though I am here in body, my mind and my nerves too are not yet altogether here.

The faster one goes, the more strain there is on the senses, the more they fail to take in,

the more confusion they must tolerate or gloss over-and the longer it takes to bring the

mind to a stop in the presence of anything. The man who walks into the wilderness is

naked indeed…He leaves behind his work, his household, his duties, his comforts-even, if he comes

alone, his words. He immerses himself in what he is not. It is a kind of death. Slowly my

mind and my nerves have slowed to a walk. The quiet of the woods has ceased to be

something that I observe; now it is something that I am a part of. I have joined it with my

own quiet."

Concept: organic transcendence

-Wendell Berry

The Heron

While the summer's growth kept me

anxious in planted rows, I forgot the river

where it flowed, faithful to its way,

beneath the slope where my household

has taken its laborious stand.

I could not reach it even in dreams.

But one morning at the summer’s end

I remember it again, as though its being

lifts into mind in undeniable flood,

and I carry my boat down through the fog,

over the rocks, and set out.

I go easy and silent, and the warblers

appear among the leaves of the willows,

their flight like gold thread

quick in the live tapestry of the leaves.

And I go on until I see crouched

on a dead branch sticking out of the water

a heron—so still that I believe

he is a bit of drift hung dead above the water.

And then I see the articulation of a feather

and living eye, a brilliance I receive

beyond my power to make, as he

receives in his great patience

the river's providence. And then I see

that I am seen. Still, as I keep,

I might be a tree for all the fear he shows.

Suddenly I know I have passed across

to a shore where I do not live.

-Wendell Berry

Concept: ecocentrism via organic transcendence

"As soon as I felt the necessity to learn about the nonhuman world, I wished to learn

about it in a hurry. And then I began to learn perhaps the most important lesson that

nature had to teach me: that I could not learn about her in a hurry. The most important

learning,that of experience, can be neither summoned nor sought out…

The most worthy knowledge cannot be acquired by what is known as study-though that

is necessary and has its use. It comes in its own good time and in its own way to the

man who will go to where it lives, and wait, and be ready, and watch...Patience is as

valuable as industry. What is to be known is always there. When it reveals itself to you,or

when you come upon it, it is by chance. The only condition is your being there and being

watchful." -Wendell Berry

2. "Perhaps it is to prepare to hear someday the music of the spheres that I am always

turning my ears to the music of streams. There is indeed a music in streams, but it is not

for the hurried. It has to be loitered by and imagined. Or imagined toward, for it is hardly

for men at all. Nature has a patient ear...

She is satisfied to have the notes drawn out to the lengths of days or weeks or months.

Small variations are acceptable to her, modulations as leisurely as the opening of

a flower....The ear must imagine an impossible patience in order to grasp even the

unimaginableness of such music...Sitting in a canoe, riding the back of the flooding

river as it flows down into a bend, and turns, the currents racing and crashing among

the trees along the outside shore, and flows on, one senses the volume and power all

together...To some degree it remains unimaginable, as is suggested by the memory's

recurrent failure to hold on to it. It can never be remembered as wild as it is, and so each

new experience of it bears some of the shock of surprise. It would take the mind of a god

to watch it as it changes and not be surprised.

3. "Though I am here in body, my mind and my nerves too are not yet altogether here.

The faster one goes, the more strain there is on the senses, the more they fail to take in,

the more confusion they must tolerate or gloss over-and the longer it takes to bring the

mind to a stop in the presence of anything. The man who walks into the wilderness is

naked indeed…

He leaves behind his work, his household, his duties, his comforts-even, if he comes

alone, his words. He immerses himself in what he is not. It is a kind of death. Slowly my

mind and my nerves have slowed to a walk. The quiet of the woods has ceased to be

something that I observe; now it is something that I am a part of. I have joined it with my

own quiet."

The Silence

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 a sound

that is not a name.

It is in the silence

that my hope is, and my aim.

A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing

sounds men's silence

like a root. Let me say

and not mourn: the world

lives in the death of speech

and sings there.

5. "Scenery, as we speak of the word, involves an oversimplification and falsification

of nature. It is landscape with all the vital details excepted. It is the notion that permits

the indulgence of our wish to prettify nature-to pretend that nature is represented by

butterflies but not mosquitoes, sunrises and sunsets, but not hotnoons, moonlight but not

darkness, life but not death. One must go close and be still. And that cannot be done

with a motor, or with a motorized intelligence…

At twenty or thirty miles an hour the countryside can be no more than a pretty package

a vacation comes in-to be used like other packages, disposed of as soon as the contents

are used up. It is hardly to be kept in mind after it has been used, which means that it is

likely to be used carelessly, or even contemptuously... We must go to the natural places

to become quiet in them. We must go to know these places, because to know them is to

need them and respect them and be humble before them, is to preserve them. To fail to

know them, because ignorance can only be greedy of them, is to destroy them." -Wendell Berry

6. "We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary

assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we

make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to co-

operate in its process, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn

to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it.

We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe…

We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in

its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence

before the world that our species will be able to remain in it...Now it has become urgent

that the sense of community should include the world, that it should come to be a

realization that all men ultimately share the same place, the same nature, and the same

destiny...But the ideal community would include not just the living; it would include the

unborn. It would be aware with a clarity and concern which the best of us have hardly

imagined, that the living cannot think or speak or act without changing the lives of those

who live after them...And it would include the place, the land, itself. For man is not

merely 'in' the world. He is, he must realize and learn to say or be doomed, part of it. The

earth he is made of he bears in trust." -Wendell Berry

"And now a leaf, spiraling down in wild flight, lands on my shirt front at about the third

button below the collar. At first I am bemused and mystified by the coincidence-that the

leaf should have been so hung, weighted and shaped, so ready to fall, so nudged loose

and slanted by the breeze, as to fall where I, by the same delicacy of circumstance,

happened to be lying. The event, among all its ramifying causes and considerations, and

finally its mysteries, begins to take on the magnitude of history. Portent begins to dwell in

it. And suddenly I apprehend in it the dark proposal of the ground…

Under the fallen leaf my breastbone burns with imminent decay. Other leaves fall. My

body begins its long shudder into humus. I feel my substance escape me, carried into

the mold by beetles and worms. Days, winds, seasons pass over me as I sink under the

leaves. For a time only sight is left to me, a passive awareness of the sky over head,

birds crossing, the mazed interreachings of the treetops, the leaves falling-and then that,

too, sinks away. It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace. When I move to go, it is as though

I rise up out of the world.

-Wendell Berry

8. "...at the camp we had around us the elemental world of water and light and earth

and air. We felt the presences of the wild creatures,…

the river, the trees, the stars. Though we had our troubles, we had them in a true

perspective."

9.

Now it has become urgent that the sense of community should include the world, that it

should come to be a realization that all men ultimately share the same place, the same

nature, and the same destiny...

But the ideal community would include not just the living; it would include the unborn. It

would be aware with a clarity and concern which the best of us have hardly imagined,

that the living cannot think or speak or act without changing the lives of those who live

after them...And it would include the place, the land, itself. For man is not merely 'in' the

world. He is, he must realize and learn to say or be doomed, part of it. The earth he is

made of he bears in trust.

Pine Tree Tops

in the blue night

frost haze, the sky glows

with the moon

pine tree tops

bend snow-blue, fade

into sky, frost, starlight.

the creak of boots.

rabbit tracks, deer tracks.

what do we know.as

Piute Creek

One granite ridge

A tree would be enough

Or even a rock, a small creek,

A bark shred in a pool.

Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted

Tough trees crammed

In thin stone fractures

A huge moon on it all, is too much.

The mind wanders. A million

Summers, night air still and the rocks

Warm. Sky over endless mountains.

All the junk that goes with being human

Drops away, hard rock wavers

Even the heavy present seems to fail

This bubble of a heart

Words and books

Like a small creek of a small ledge

Gone in the dry air.

A clear, attentive mind

Has no meaning but that

Which sees is truly seen.

No one loves rock yet we are here.

Night chills. A flick

In the moonlight

Slips into shadow:

Back there unseen

Cold proud eyes

Of Cougar or Coyote

Watch me rise and go.

13. "To resolve the dichotomy of the civilized and the wild, we must first resolve to be

whole by directly intuiting our condition in the actually existing world we realize that we

have had nothing from the beginning...

The experience of emptiness engenders compassion."

14. "The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom. We learn to

take ourselves as no more or no less than another being in the Big Watershed…

We can accept each other as barefooted equals sleeping on the same ground. We can

give up hoping to be eternal and quit fighting dirt. We can chase off mosquitoes and

fence out varmints without hating them."

15. "The wilderness pilgrim's step by step breath by breath walk up a trail into those

snowfields, carrying all on the back,

is so ancient a set of gestures as to bring a profound sense of body-mind joy."

16. "The point is to make intimate contact with the real world, real self. Sacred refers

to that which helps take us (not only human beings) out of our little selves into the

whole mountains rivers mandala universe. One should not dwell on the specialness

of the extraordinary experience nor hope to leave the political quagg behind to enter a

perpetual state of heightened insight….

The best purpose of such studies and hikes is to be able to come back to the lowlands

and see all the land about us, agricultural, suburban, urban, as part of the same territory-

never totally ruined, never completely unnatural. It can be restored, and humans could

live in considerable numbers on much of it. Great Brown Bear is walking with us, Salmon

swimming upstream with us, as we stroll a city street.

17.

“Burning the Small Dead”

Burning the small dead

branches

broke from beneath

thick spreading whitebark pine.

a hundred summers

snowmelt rock and air

hiss in a twisted bough. sierra granite;

Mt. Ritter-

black rock twice as old.

Deneb, Altair

windy fire

18. Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows

which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness- to wade sometimes in marshes

where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to

smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her

nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we

are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and

unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us

because unfathomable.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of

inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the

wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain

which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits

transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered

when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens

us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the

hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way,

especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the

strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this."

-Henry Thoreau Walden (1854)

19. "I went to live in the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the

essential facts of life, and see if I couldn't learn what it had to teach…

I went to the woods to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it

proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish

its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to

give a true account of it in my next excursion.

-Henry Thoreau Walden (1854)

20. "It is my fear that if we allow the freedom of the hills and the last of the wilderness to

be taken from us,

the very idea of freedom may die with it."

21. "...wilderness invokes nostalgia, a justified not merely sentimental nostalgia for the

lost America our forefathers knew. The word suggests the past and the unknown, the

womb of the earth from which we all emerged…

It means something lost and something still present, something remote and at the same

time intimate, something buried in our blood and nerves, something beyond us and

without limit."

22. "a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability. and beauty of the

biotic community.

It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

23. "Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands

through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language…

The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of

words."

24. "one must learn to think like a mountain,

(for) only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf…"

25. "I think of two landscapes-one outside the self, the other within. The external

landscape is the one we see-not only the line and color of the land and its shading at

different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its

geology, the record of its climate and evolution.

The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of

a part of the external landscape...The interior landscape responds to the character and

subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of an individual mind is affected by land as it

is by genes."

26. “We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives

with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most

of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our

time.

A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective

thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this

is behind Thoreau's dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is

the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom

perceived among men.”

27. “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member

of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his

place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order

that there may be a place to compete for).

The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils,

waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. A land ethic, then, reflects the

existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual

responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.

Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.”

28. Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won't compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion - put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie down in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn't go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

-Wendell Berry “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

30. Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

All that has come to us,

has come as the river comes,

given in passing away.

And if our wickedness

destroys the watershed,

dissolves the beautiful field,

then I must grieve and learn

that I possess by loss

the earth I live upon

and stand in and am...

'Whatever is left is what is'-...15

It occurs to me that it is no longer possible to imagine how this country

looked in the beginning, before the white people drove their plows into it.

It is not possible to know what was the shape of the land here in this

hollow when it was first cleared. Too much of it is gone, loosed by the

plows and washed away by the rain. I am not looking at the same land the

first newcomers saw. The original surface of the hill is as extinct as the

passenger pigeon. The pristine America that the first white man saw is a

lost continent, sunk like Atlantis in the sea. The thought of what was here

once and is gone forever will not leave me as long as I live. It is as though

I walk knee-deep in its absence.16

-Wendell Berry

16.

"To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are-painful, impermanent,

open, imperfect-and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us.

For in a fixed universe there would be no freedom..."6

The Want of Peace

Wendell Berry

All goes back to the earth,

and so I do not desire

pride of excess or power,

but the contentments made

by men who have had little:

the fisherman’s silence

receiving the river’s grace,

the gardener’s musing on rows.

I lack the peace of simple things.

I am never wholly in place.

I find no peace or grace.

We sell the world to buy fire,

our way lighted by burning men,

and that has bent my mind

and made me think of darkness

and wish for the dumb life of roots.

A Walk

Sunday the only day we don't work:

Mules farting around the meadow,

Murphy fishing,

The tent flaps in the warm

Early sun: I've eaten breakfast and I'll

Take a walk

To Benson Lake. Packed a lunch,

Goodbye. Hopping on creekbed boulders

Up the rock throat three miles

Puite Creek –

In steep gorge glacier-slick rattlesnake country

Jump, land by a pool, trout skitter,

The clear sky. Deer tracks.

Bad place by a falls, boulders big as houses,

Lunch tied to belt,

I stemmed up a crack and almost fell

But rolled out safe on a ledge

and ambled on.

Quail chicks freeze underfoot, color of stone

Then run cheep! away, hen quail fussing.

Craggy west end of Benson Lake – after edging

Past dark creek pools on a long white slope –

Lookt down in the ice-black lake

lined with cliff

From far above: deep shimmering trout.

A lone duck in a gunsightpass

steep side hill

Through slide-aspen and talus, to the east end,

Down to grass, wading a wide smooth stream

Into camp. At last.

By the rusty three-year-

Ago left-behind cookstove

Of the old trail crew,

Stoppt and swam and ate my lunch.

- Gary Snyder