Pressure of sun on the rockslide whirled me in a dizzy hop-and-step descent, Pool of pebbles buzzed in a Juniper shadow, Tiny tongue of a this-year rattlesnake flicked, I leaped, laughing for little boulder-color coil — Pounded by heat raced down the slabs to the creek Deep tumbling under arching walls and stuck Whole head and shoulders in the water: Stretched full on cobble—ears roaring Eyes open aching from the cold and face a trout.
— Gary Snyder “I am a poet who has preferred not to distinguish in poetry between nature and humanity.”
One of my favorite books of poetry is Riprap and the Cold Mountain Poems, by Gary Snyder.
The book includes Snyder’s translations of Han-shan’s Cold Mountain Poems. Han-shan was both a man and a mountain, a mountain madman in an old line of ragged hermits. He lived at a place called Cold Mountain, a poor poet having a crazy character. He wrote poems that were rough and fresh, and when he wrote about Cold Mountain, he means himself, his home, his state of mind.
— kenne
Gary Snyder reading “I settled at Cold Mountain long ago . . .”
Bee On Desert Chicory Wildflower — Computer Art by kenne
“If public lands come under greater pressure to be opened for exploitation and use in the twenty-first century, it will be the local people, the watershed people, who will prove to be the last and possibly most effective line of defense.” — Gary Snyder
My home was at Cold Mountain from the start, Rambling among the hills, far from trouble.
Gone, and a million things leave no trace loose, and it flows through the galaxies A fountain of light, into the very mind — Not a thing, and yet it appears before me: Now I know the pearl of the Buddha-nature Know its use: a boundless perfect sphere.
Image by kenne
Desert Chicory on Mt. Lemmon — Image by kenne
Bee On Desert Chicory Wildflower — Computer Art by kenne
Bug Springs Trail Landscape — Black & White Image by kenne
Grasshopper (August 17, 2011) Image by kenne
Painted Lady on Western Sneezeweed (Mt. Lemmon) — Image by kenne
