Gary Snyder

“The blue mountains are constantly walking." Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. -- "If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking." -- Dōgen is not concerned with "sacred mountains" - or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters.”

“In the glittering light I got drunk and reeled through the rooms, And cried, “Cartagena! swamp of unholy loves!” And wept for the Indian whores who were younger than me, and I was eighteen, And splashed after the crew down the streets wearing sandals bought at a stall And got back to the ship, dawn came, we were far out at sea.”

“Damn me not I make a better fool. And there is nothing vaster, more beautiful, remote, unthinking (eternal rose-red sunrise on the surf—great rectitude of rocks) than man, inhuman man, At whom I look for a thousand light years from a seat near Scorpio, amazed and touched by his concern and pity for my plight, a simple star, Then trading shapes again. My wife is gone, my girl is gone, my books are loaned, my clothes are worn, I gave away a car; and all that happened years ago. Mind & matter, love & space are frail as foam on beer.”

“I thought I heard an axe chop in the woods It broke the dream; and woke up dreaming on a train. It must have been a thousand years ago In some old mountain sawmill of Japan. A horde of excess poets and unwed girls And I that night prowled Tokyo like a bear Tracking the human future Of intelligence and despair.”

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

“I’m sixty-eight” he said, “I first bucked hay when I was seventeen. 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.”

“What use, Milton, a silly story Of our lost general parents, eaters of fruit?”

“When men see Han-shanThey all say he's crazyAnd not much to look at -Dressed in rags and hides.They don't get what I sayAnd I don't talk their language.All I can say to those I meet:"Try and make it to Cold Mountain.”

“I have lived at Cold MountainThese thirty long years.Yesterday I called on friends and family:More than half had gone to the Yellow Springs.Slowly consumed, like fire down a candle;Forever flowing, like a passing river.Now, morning, I face my lone shadow:Suddenly my eyes are bleared with tears.”

“I wanted a good place to settle:Cold Mountain would be safe.Light wind in a hidden pine -Listen close - the sound gets better.Under it a gray haired manMumbles along reading Huang and Lao.For ten years I havn't gone back homeI've even forgotten the way by which I came.”

“In the mountains it's cold.Always been cold, not just this year.Jagged scarps forever snowed inWoods in the dark ravines spitting mist.Grass is still sprouting at the end of June,Leaves begin to fall in early August.And here I am, high on mountains,Peering and peering, but I can't even see the sky.”

“The size of the place that one becomesa member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.”

“The Buddha taught that all life is suffering. We might also say that life, being both attractive and constantly dangerous, is intoxicating and ultimately toxic. 'Toxic' comes from toxicon, Pendell tells us, with a root meaning of 'a poisoned arrow.' All organic life is struck by the arrows of real and psychic poisons. This is understood by any true, that is to say, not self-deluding, spiritual path.”

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

“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.”

“Great Brown Bear is walking with us, Salmon swimming upstream with us, as we stroll a city street.”

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

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

“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.”

“Having a place means that you know what a place means...what it means in a storied sense of myth, character and presence but also in an ecological sense...Integrating native consciousness with mythic consciousness”

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

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

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

“There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.”

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

“But if you do know what is taught by plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can feel truly at home. The sum of a field's forces [become] what we call very loosely the 'spirit of the place.' To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made or parts, each of which in a whole. You start with the part you are whole in.”

“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.”

“stay togetherlearn the flowersgo light”

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

“I thought, that day I started,I sure would hate to do this all my life,And dammit, that’s just whatI’ve gone and done.”

“I hold the most archaic values on earth ... the fertility of the soul, the magic of the animals, the power-vision in solitude.... the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.”

“Being the StreamMeditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of thestream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream,so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies.Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totallyinto it.”

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

“On Climbing the Sierra Mountains again after 31 yearsRange after range of mountainsYear after year after year.I am still in love.”

“Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass.The moss is slippery, though there's been no rainThe pine sings, but there's no wind.Who can leap the world's tiesAnd sit with me among the white clouds?”

“Lay down these wordsBefore your mind like rocks. placed solid, by handsIn choice of place, setBefore the body of the mind in space and time:Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things:Cobble of milky way. straying planets,These poems, people, lost ponies withDragging saddles -- and rocky sure-foot trails.The worlds like an endless four-dimensionalGame of Go. ants and pebblesIn the thin loam, each rock a word a creek-washed stoneGranite: ingrained with torment of fire and weightCrystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts,As well as things.”

“All this new stuff goes on topturn it over, turn it overwait and water downfrom the dark bottomturn it inside outlet it spread throughSift down even.Watch it sprout.A mind like compost.”

“In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!”

“As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”

“I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.”

“I have a friend who feels sometimes that the world is hostile to human life--he says it chills us and kills us. But how could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions--gravity and a livable temperature range between freezing and boiling--have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The "place" (from the root plat, broad, spreading, flat) gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind. We should be thankful for that, and take nature's stricter lessons with some grace.”