3 Items by Gary Snyder

For All:

 "Ah to be alive on a mid-September morn fording a stream barefoot, pants rolled up, holding boots, pack on, sunshine, ice in the shallows, northern rockies. Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes cold nose dripping singing inside creek music, heart music, smell of sun on gravel. I pledge allegiance 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."

  from:http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/snyder.html

A path is something that can be followed, it takes you somewhere. "Linear." What would a path stand against? "No path." Off the path, off the trail. So what's off the path? In a sense everything else is off the path. The relentless complexity of the world is off to the side of the trail. For hunters and herders trails weren't always so useful. For a forager, the path is not where you walk for long. Wild herbs, camas bulbs, quail, dye plants, are away from the path. The whole range of items that fulfill our needs is out there. We must wander through it to learn and memorize the field

--rolling, crinkled, eroded, gullied, ridged (wrinkled like the brain) -- holding the map in mind. This is the economic-visualization-meditation exercise of the Inupiaq and Athapaskans of Alaska of this very day. http://www.albany.edu/~litmag/archives/vol213/map.html 

 "Find your place on the planet, dig in and, take responsibility from there."

Gary Snyder