The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you.

In the loss of skill, we lose stewardship; in losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of Creation. It is possible - as our experience in this good land shows - to exile ourselves from Creation, and to ally ourselves with the principle of destruction - which is, ultimately, the principle of nonentity. It is to be willing in general for being to not-be. And once we have allied ourselves with that principle, we are foolish to think that we can control the results. (pg. 303, The Gift of Good Land)

We can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being humans not by trying to be gods.

It is to be broken. It is to be torn open. It is not to be reached and come to rest in ever. I turn against you, I break from you, I turn to you. We hurt, and are hurt, and have each other for healing. It is healing. It is never whole.

If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

Willing to die you give up your will; keep still, until moved by what moves all else, you move.