Collecting bottles, tossing leftovers, taking out the garbage
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Gary Snyder is a poet, lecturer, and environmental activist. He served as the inspiration for the main character in Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums.
The pathless world of wild nature is a surpassing school and those who have lived through her can be tough and funny teachers.
To talk, as some do, about “making a world without war” when we’d be lucky to have a world without nuclear weapons, is talking hearsay and utopian theory. We can’t just talk peace, we have to be peace, or it’s another kind of bravado. I’d like a world without war; but we’d all settle for a world without wars that kill everything. — Gary Snyder
Poetry effects change by fiddling with the archetypes and getting at people’s dreams about a century before it actually effects historical change. A poet would be, in terms of the ecology of symbols, noting the main structural connections and seeing which parts of the symbol are no longer useful or applicable, though everyone is giving them credence.
Once in the Jurassic, about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a great Discourse to all the assembled elements and energies . . . a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.