Gary Snyder on How to Unbreak the World

“What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds.”

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her poem “The Speed of Darkness” not long after James Baldwin told an audience of writers that “we made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.” We make the world not with our ballots — though they do, oh they do matter — but with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capabl...