“A little too abstract, a little too wise,It is time for us to kiss the earth again,It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,Let the rich life run to the roots again.”

“Nature knows that people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve ... As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves. We must unhumanize our views a little and become confident as the rock and ocean that we are made from.”

“We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhmanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.”

“The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrelsWith her meagre pale demoralized daughter.Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sunAnd saying that when she was first marriedShe lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon.(It is empty now, the roof has fallenBut the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoodsHave all been cut down, the oaks are standing;The place is now more solitary than ever before.)"When I was nursing my second babyMy husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brakeAnd brought it; I put its mouth to the breastRather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies.Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler,Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach.I had more joy from that than from the others."Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad roadWith market-wagons, mean cares and decay.She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skinSoon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows,I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries,The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.”

“Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated Challengers of oblivion Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down, The square-limbed Roman letters Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly; For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun Die blind and blacken to the heart: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems.”

“What is this thing called life? I believeThat the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life,Only we do not call it so--I speak of the lifeThat oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo-Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energyMakes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things growFrom a chemical reaction?I think they were here already, I think the rocksAnd the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxieshave their various consciousness, all things are conscious;But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brainBring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glassTo concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearthFrom which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animalsBorn howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryardPrefer silence; but those and all things have their own awareness,As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all,Like the cells of a man's body making one being,They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.”

“I've changed my ways a little, I cannot nowRun with you in the evenings along the shore,Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment,You see me there.”