The  Spirit  In  This  Place  

A Cloud withdrew from the Sky

Superior Glory be

But that Cloud and its Auxillaries

Are forever lost to me

Had I but further scanned

Had I secured the Glow

In an Hermetic Memory

It had availed me now.

Never to pass the Angel

With a glance and a Bow

Till I am firm in Heaven

Is my intention now.

Emily Dickinson

The Rapture of a finished Day —

Returning to the West —

All these — remind us of the place

That Men call 'paradise' —

Emily Dickinson

(Anne: Hermetically Sealed by the Camera!)

 from Gary Snyder …

The poems speak of place,
and the energy pathways that sustain life.
Each living being is a swirl in the flow
a formal turbulence a 'song'

The land, the planet itself  is also a living being
— at another pace.
Anglos, black people, Chicanos, and others
beached up on these shores
all share such views  at the deepest levels
of their old cultural traditions
— African, Asian, or Europeans.

Hard again to those roots,
to see our ancient solidarity,
and then to the work of being together
on Turtle Island.

But if you do know what is taught by plants and weather,

you are in on the gossip and can feel truly at home.
The sum of a field’s forces [become] what we call very loosely
the 'spirit of the place.'

To know the spirit of the place
is to realize that you are part of a part
and that the whole is made of parts
each of which is a whole.
You start with the  part you are whole in.

The traditional harmlessness and refusal to take life in any form
has nation-shaking implications.
The practice of meditation,
for which one needs only 'the ground beneath one’s feet',

wipes out mountains of junk being pumped into the mind
by the mass media and supermarket universities. 

Gary Snyder

YouTube Video