27 April 2019

Belong.


The wild, often dismissed as savage and chaotic by "civilized" thinkers, is actually impartially, relentlessly, and beautifully formal and free. Its expression -- the richness of plant and animal life on the globe including us, the rainstorms, windstorms, and calm spring mornings -- is the real world, to which we belong.  In the Western Hemisphere we have only the tiniest number of buildings that can be called temples or shrines. The temples of our hemisphere will be some of the planet's remaining wilderness areas.

All too many people in power in the governments and universities of the world seem to carry a prejudice against the natural world -- and also against the past, against history. It seems Americans would live by a Chamber-of-Commerce Creationism that declares itself satisfied with a divinely presented Shopping Mall. The integrity and character of our own ancestors is dismissed with "I couldn't live like that" by people who barely know how to live at all. An ancient forest is seen as a kind of overripe garbage, not unlike the embarrassing elderly.

Gary Snyder, from The Practice of the Wild

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