“How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your TV; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.” ― Edward Abbey
Some big assumptions there but similar to Voltaire’s advice.
I love these raw moist dawns witha thousand birds you hear but can’tquite see in the mist.My old alien body is a foreignerstruggling to get into another country.The loon call makes me shiver.Back at the cabin I see a bookand am not quite sure what that is.— Jim Harrison
“Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy… or they become legend.”— Jim Harrison
“Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.”—Carl Jung
“You can best serve civilizationby being against what usuallypasses for it.”― Wendell Berry
Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible.
-Mary Oliver
“And so I go to the woods. As I go in under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing I do, things fall into place. I enter an order that does not exist outside, in the human spaces….I am less important than I thought. I rejoice in that.”
-Wendell Berry
“On Saturday night, my oldest friend, Jim Harrison, sat at his desk writing. He wrote in longhand. The words trailed off into scribbles and he fell from his chair dead. His strength of personality was such that his death will cut many adrift. He was seventy-eight years old and had lived and worked hard for every one of those years…He was active and creative to the end, but it was time to go: no one was less suited to assisted living.”
From the moment we met, we talked about writing, and in some ways co-evolved over time, through letters and talk, until our views hardened and separated to such a degree that it was better not to do it in person. But we went on as before, in weekly letters, and continued to do so until a week ago; and left all that was not literary—nature, food, sport, love—to times we actually saw each other. To select a book or poem from the ether for chat was best handled in print, though we could revisit favorites for euphoric consanguinity. At times, we resorted to censorious silence. We worked out differences in letters and tried to make each other better. I could always expect Jim to write something marvellous and seemingly out of the blue. Few American writers of recent times have had his erudition and phenomenal memory. To the end, Jim was a country boy who’d been touched.