thoreau walks

"We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return-- prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife or husband and child and friends, and never see them again--if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man or woman -- then you are ready for a walk."

What is The Answer?

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

Albert Einstein

David Orr

"The message is urgent: unplug, boot it down, get off-line, get outdoors, breathe again, become real in the real world."

Buddha

"There is a place where the sky and the sea meet. It is there that you will find peace."

Rumi

"Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field... I'll meet you there."

This Moment

"The only way to learn to fully appreciate the beauty of the world around us is to focus fully on the present moment. To be mentally absorbed in anything but the present is to be centered not in reality but in ideas about reality."

"As human we have a limited perception of reality. However, by properly looking, listening, thinking, meditating, and by heeding our hearts as much as our minds, we can begin to perceive the world as it really is"

Albert

"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science."

Buddha

"There is only one moment in time when it is essential to awaken. That moment is now."

Robbins

"When each of us comes to the end of our lives, what will matter is not what our social standing was, or whether the world thought we were important or influential. What will matter, what in fact always matters, are the values we uphold and the principles and possibilities we stand for. What will matter then, and what matters now, are the quality of the love we share with the world and the statements we make with our choices and our lives."

John Robbins

"Do you see why I carry this man with me in my heart? Do you see why he is such a hero to me? He dared to leap, to risk everything, to leave what was killing his spirit even though he didn't know what was next. He left behind a way of life that he knew was wrong, and he found one that he knows is right."

Thornton Wilder

“The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose”

Year Of The Dragon 2012

"The Chinese ancients believed that if you breathe life and energy into your spiritual dragon, or your greater self, you create change that breathes life and energy into all, allowing you to ride the dragon’s expansive spirit to a zenith of endless possibilities."

Albert Einstein

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

JOHN L.

"When you find love, you find peace."

Rule #6: Don't take yourself so damn seriously.

"But we are clay as well as spirit. We exist, earth bound, for some seventy or eighty years. The problem I have always had with any overly 'spiritual' path is that it sometimes denies life. We have an eternity to exist in the soup of universal energy, but just a few precious decades to savor rich coffee, whether it's bad for us or not. To plant zucchini; to people-watch in a subway car; to love jazz. To love others, even if it gets messy."
-William Powers-

William Powers

"The difference between actually very serious and actually very funny is actually very thin."

Nietzsche

"For happiness, how little suffices for happiness!...the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a wisk, an eye glance - little maketh up the best happiness. Be still."

kerouac

"the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE... Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there—and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expression to fit and go with it, which is you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen!"

JFK

"All of us must consider our own responsibilities for the physical vigor of our children and of the young men and women of our communities. We do not want our children to become a nation of spectators. Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life."

Ed Abbey

"I'm not an atheist... I'm an earthiest"

The Dancing Wu Li Masters

"What is out there apparently depends, in a rigorous mathematical sense, as well as a philosophical one, upon what we decide in here. The new physics tells us that an observer cannot observe without altering what they see."

Hesher

"Life is like walking in the rain... you can hide and take cover or you can just get wet."

the incontrovertible union of contradictory truths

"In the mixture of starlight and cloud-reflected sunlight in which the desert world is now illuminated, each single object stands forth in preternatural though transient brilliance, a final assertion of existence before the coming of night: each rock and shrub and tree, each flower, each stem of grass, diverse and separate, vividly isolate, yet joined each to every other in a unity which generously includes me and my solitude as well.
Or so it seems at the moment, as my fire dies to a twist of smoke and a heap of rubies, and for a moment I think I've almost caught a falling star: there is no mystery; there is only paradox, the incontrovertible union of contradictory truths. A falling star which melts into vapor as I grasp it, which flows through my fingers like water, like smoke."
ed abbey

Another Abbey

“How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.”

Ed Abbey

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”

Sweet Grass

Lying, face down
in the sweet
green grass

Breaths coming
in gasps

she is dying.

she has fled
the confines of
her bed, her prison.

she has shed
the robe
that had bound her
too tightly.

and, now,
here she lies.

naked and bare
exposed to the earth.

voices from
another time
shouting....

"no" "rise"
"keep fighting"
"stay with us"

she raises her
single index
finger...

as if to say
"give me a minute"

knowing that a
minute is all
she has.

she whispers.

"be quiet
and I will describe
death to you"

her eyes dilate.

the intense light
feels dark.

the earth is
humming.

and she hums with it.

in tune
in the moment
she wonders
if she has ever
been this alive
before?

one with the earth
and at peace with
herself.

she dies.

Wendell Berry

“Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”

Pollan

“Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.”

Emerson

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."

Dyer

"How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours."