Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.

Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.

I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

There was not one cause for our internment, but many - a deep-seated racial prejudice working on top of fear, distrust, and greed. So how is one to say exactly where history begins or ends? It is all slow oscillations, curves, and waves which take so long to reveal themselves ... like watching a tree grow.

Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild is an exquisite, far-sighted articulation of what freedom, wildness, goodness, and grace mean, using the lessons of the planet to teach us how to live.

To know something, then, we must be scrubbed raw, the fasting heart exposed.