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 A little too abstract, a little too wise,

 It is time for us to kiss the earth again,

 It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,

 Let the rich life run to the roots again.

 I will go to the lovely Sur Rivers 

 And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders. 

 I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers

 In the ocean wind over the river boulders.

 I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,

 That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,

 The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks

 So that they cannot strike, hardly can fly. 

 Things are the hawk's food and noble is the mountain, Oh noble

 Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble. 

 --Robinson Jeffers 

 Born in a town outside Pittsburgh, Pa., Robinson Jeffers relocated to California at the beginning of the 20th century. He was a famous poet by the 1930s, though his popularity waned due to his muddled political poems and pacifism during World War II, and the alleged implication that he believed humanity was rushing towards extinction.

 He inspired generations of poets and ecologists, forging a direct line of California poets through Kenneth Rexroth to Gary Snyder and beyond, a legacy that still expands and flowers. He put Big Sur on the map for those succeeding generations as well.

 Unfortunately, there’s nobody enjoying these particular Big Sur landscapes at the moment due to drought and fire, for the second year in a row. Even the timeless is subject to the times. But the impulse is the same: tired of politics and abstraction, he seeks contact in the fullness of the natural world, and simultaneously, the fullness of the moment when opened to that world. Which we can do just about anywhere.