Everybody needs beauty as well as bread,
places to play in and pray in, where nature
may heal and give strength to body and soul.
~John Muir
Young men and women, abandon your cars,
abandon your cities, abandon nations and governments!
Go to the village, and beyond the village, to the woods.
Leave Jerusalem: Wander through Galilean meadows,
among the pagan wells of Samaria.
Leave the palace: take off your crown and pearls,
dance with the cowherd girls and boys at Vrindavan.
Make your marriage bed of moss,
find the oasis of the river otter,
learn of the anthill and swamp lantern,
kneel in the place where the elk shed their antlers
dreaming of Autumn bugle song.
Leave the ruined towers, the bank vaults of emptiness,
erase the borders, smash leveler and compass.
Nature laughs at edges, she knows no straight and narrow.
Love wanders in fractals, and lovers get lost
in all directions at once:
they call their bewilderment "home."
Let your morning prayer be the motionless
explosion
of a rhododendron into atoms of fire.
No one owns an acre, no, not even a handful of soil!
Cast a circle in your campsite,
but stay only til dawn.
Your zip code is the color of the blossoms you sleep under.
Every worker's heart beats out of the berry
you caress in the palm of your hand.
Eat slow, the way wind nibbles the mountain.
Become skillful in the brewing of teas that heal,
made from weeds in abandoned factories.
A vineyard of magical entanglements
springs up from every burnt place:
trust in time.
Learn root medicine from dangerous leaves.
Drink infinitesimal proportions of nettle and hemlock.
Never ride, walk everywhere,
softly on the earth as moonlight-driven thistle-down,
each footfall an uprooting and return.
Money is over: invest in the wealth of friendship.
Economy is this:
reduce your wants until you know your need.
How many pairs of shoes are required to take an evening walk?
Wet grass and warm sand are two vast sandals
fitted for your nakedness.
When it rains in the forest, seated in your cedar hut,
you are She, the paleolithic grandmother,
except for one spiral of difference:
you have a website with ten million hits!
One of you is village shaman, another midwife and healer.
One makes flutes and drums, one teaches children how
to sing plant songs and talk to trees like wind.
Yes, there are carpenters among you,
hemp weavers and weavers of spells;
and gnomic guardians of the underground river
of sacred information,
keeping computers alive with runes of silicon.
Don't worry, fungi will eat your father's plastic;
angels of bacteria will devour landfills
and drums of toxic sludge;
organs of the new technology entwined with liver and spleen
inside your grass-fed free-range body;
nano-music in the cells of your amygdala,
transmitting herbal medicine from Tibet,
Macho Picchu, the green ruins of Paris;
transistors in root vegetables, mushrooms of beryllium,
prayers, mantras, drum thunder,
cables of high speed access to God,
all mingled in your brown body, Villager, Voyager
to a new dance on the prehistoric spiral,
where magic chuckles with accuracy
and science nods in wonder,
where the market is faith and the barter is trust
and all debts are forgiven.
"Abundance, abundance!" cries the wren,
flashing through a golden beam among green layers
of ancient darkness.
(My photo: nurse log and red fungi in the Carbon River rain forest,
Mount Rainier, May 14, 2012)
