Great Throughts Treasury

"So much more is possible when fear no longer holds us captive."

"“From the masses to the masses” the most revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most ruthlessly exploited classes: animals, trees, water, air, grasses."

"Wisdom is the intuitive knowledge of the mind of love and clarity that lies beneath one's ego-driven anxieties and aggressions. Meditation is going into the mind to see this for yourself - over and over again, until it becomes the mind you live in."

"Nature is not a place to visit. It is home."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat - and the old, old habitat of humans - falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies."

"Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged?"

"When freedom fails, politicians use that failure to justify abandoning freedom, but when the state fails, politicians use the failure to justify expanding the state."

"All this new stuff goes on top turn it over, turn it over wait and water down from the dark bottom turn it inside out let it spread through Sift down even. Watch it sprout. A mind like compost."

"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."

"Being the Stream. Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the stream 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 totally into it."

"Better, the perfect, easy discipline of the swallows dip and swoop, without east or west."

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

"After weeks of watching the roof leak. I fixed it tonight by moving a single board."

"I have lived at Cold Mountain these 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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"Clouds sink down the hills, coffee is hot again. The dog turns and turns about, stops and sleeps."

"Gratitude to the Great Sky who holds billions of stars - and goes yet beyond that - beyond all powers, and thoughts and yet is within us - Grandfather Space. The Mind is his Wife"

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

"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 rain the pine sings, but there's no wind. Who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among the white clouds?"

"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."

"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 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."

"I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years."

"I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness— America—your stupidity. I could almost love you again."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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 man mumbles along reading Huang and Lao. For ten years I haven't gone back home. I've even forgotten the way by which I came."

"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."

"If, after obtaining Buddhahood, anyone in my land gets tossed in jail on a vagrancy rap, may I not attain highest perfect enlightenment."

"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."

"In the belly of the furnace of creativity is a sexual fire; the flames twine about each other in fear and delight. The same sort of coiling, at a cooler, slower pace, is what the life of this planet looks like. The enormous spirals of typhoons, the twists and turns of mountain ranges and gorges, the waves and the deep ocean currents - a dragon-like writhing."

"In Western Civilization, our elders are books."

"It gave a sense of the possibilities of an alternative culture. And it wasn't just poetry that moved people. It was the sense of a community, of people with a vision."

"In the mountains it's cold. Always been cold, not just this year. Jagged scarps forever snowed in woods 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."

"It was really a blessing. It helped even out the conditions across the course."

"It won't address every student every day, but we want to reach each one over the course of 180 days,"

"Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the stream 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 totally into it."

"On Climbing the Sierra Mountains again after 31 years range after range of mountains year after year after year. I am still in love."

"Lay down these words before your mind like rocks placed solid by hands in choice of place, set before 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 with dragging saddles -- and rocky sure-foot trails. The worlds like an endless four-dimensional game of Go. Ants and pebbles in the thin loam, each rock a word a creek-washed stone granite: ingrained with torment of fire and weight crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts, as well as things."

"It's about establishing a collaborative professional learning community,"

"Oil the saw, sharpen axes,learn the names of all the peaks you see and which is highest-there are hundreds-Learn by heart the drainages between go find a shallow pool of snowmelt on a good day, bathe in the lukewarm water."