What is any religion? A little ritual, a little superstition, and some magic. It's not a strictly spiritual affair; it has psychological roles to fulfill. You might not want it to be a religion based on your own experience but that's like wanting to clean up your dreams
Gary SnyderBut 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.
Gary SnyderIn Paul Friedrich's book Proto-Indo-European Trees he identifies the "semantic primitives" of the Indo-European tribe of languages through a group of words that have not changed much through twelve thousand years - and those are tree names: especially birch, willow, adler, elm, ash, apple and beech (bher, wyt, alysos, ulmo, os, abul, bhago). Seed syllables, bija, of the life of the west.
Gary Snyder