practices for awakening and resilience in a changing world
"This is the first, wildest and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness" - Mary Oliver
Poetry
Art opens pathways to ecological consciousness that analytical thought alone cannot reach. Through poetry, visual arts, music, and ritual, we access embodied knowing - the felt sense of our belonging to Earth’s community. Artists working within Deep Ecology don’t merely represent nature - they invite participation in it. Their work cultivates what Arne Naess called “beautiful action,” where aesthetic sensibility and ecological ethics become inseparable.
Poetry awakens ecological consciousness through direct encounter with the more-than-human world. Robinson Jeffers’s “inhumanism” celebrated nature’s magnificence beyond human purposes, while Gary Snyder integrated Buddhist practice and bioregional awareness. Mary Oliver accessible verse and Rainer Maria Rilke’s mystical vision offer pathways into recognizing our embeddedness within creation’s patterns. These poets demonstrate how language can restore relationship with the living Earth.
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was an American poet whose philosophy of “inhumanism” …
Quotes
“Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.”
— Robinson Jeffers
“Humanity is the mold to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, / The atom to be split.”
— Robinson Jeffers
“Hurt Hawks cannot be mended: the wild God has turned / His back on them.”
— Robinson Jeffers
“Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is / Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.”
— Robinson Jeffers
“The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty / Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.”
— Robinson Jeffers
“The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me / Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.”
— Robinson Jeffers
