With winch and ropes and hooks We stacked the bales up clean To splintery redwood rafters High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa Whirling through shingle-cracks of light, Itch of haydust in the sweaty shirt and shoes.

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.

I pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island, and to the beings who thereon dwell one ecosystem in diversity under the sun With joyful interpenetration for all.

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

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.

The old time people here in warm earth lodges thirty feet across burned pitchy pinewood slivers for their candles, snow after snow for all those centuries before— lodgefire light and pitchy slivers burning— don’t need much light for stories in the night.

I feel ancient, as though I had Lived many lives. And may never now know If I am a fool Or have done what my karma demands.

Sundown, Timber Gap —sat down— dark firs. dirty; cold; too tired to talk

The cloud across the sky. The windy pines. the trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow this is our body.

As we hoe the field let sweet potato grow. And as sit us all down when we may To consider the Dharma bring with a flower and a glimmer. Let us all sleep in peace together.

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.

Gary Snyder on How to Unbreak the World www.themarginalian.org/2025/01/31/g...

waking half-drunk in a strange pad making it out to the cool gray san francisco dawn – white gulls over white houses, fog down the bay, tamalpais a fresh green hill in the new sun, driving across the bridge in a beat old car to work.