From: Los Angeles Free Press - Sept. 29, 1967

NATURAL RESOURCES
by Liza Williams

How to keep hold of the white light in the neon night, in the silver pa-
per day, how to hold the inner infinity in a delineating society when
we are measured in the mirrors of commerce and named in statistics,
we tremble on forgetfulness and fall into inner oblivion.

What will return me to the insight which came so strongly: Nothing-
ness, nothingness being everythingness and all things being a contin-
uum. The me being eternal and transitory, these relative measure-
ments noting nothing. lam, each day I am, because I say I am and that
suffices. As Maharishi said, I smell the rose—who am I? I am the one
who smells the rose.

I thought for a while that to go among trees, unmotivated trees, trees
that are because they are and stay as long as they are, and stop when
they stop, would be to walk among sign posts. For a while it was. The
feeling of the unity of nature, the seasonal aspect of natural life, clar-
ifying the seasonableness of inner life, the birth of thought, its flow-
ering, its withering, and yet in its death it becomes the enrichment for
the next thought, much as the dying leaves melt into the ground to
nourish the shoots of next year's plants. I thought that this visible
process would align me to my own rhythm. It did, for a while it did,
but it was, I think, really a re-tracing of my own steps, through a
re-training of gait, a re-learning of motion, a clarity of progress.

In the end, the lesson absorbed, it became a matter of seduction, for
we are not trees, we do not flower in passivity as does the bush, we
are not rooted in the ground or indifferent to a multiplicity of stimuli.
From that green and pleasant land we could only take the information
that we are not tied to the earth with roots, but are meant to grow
from an inner soil as we move, and do, across a varied landscape.

So, I am back in the city, which is a totally man-made landscape,
where the forest is people and the weeds are people and some bear
fruit and some bear only copies of fruit, dry and dusty, though their
appearance is deceptive, much as next to each fruitful plant you will
find a weed, growing in imitation, similar in leaf and habit, but un-
fruited and sucking nourishment for no creative purpose.

Then I must always examine, to separate the fruitful from the weed,
the fecund from its imitator, and it is more difficult in cities where
society mixes up the vocabulary, denies the values, superimposes
the look for the honey. I must search for a deeper more solid ground,
my own earth, soil, from which to view everything, as though I were
to take my own plot of ground with me to nourish me and the world
of flowering. Weeds grow everywhere unaided, it takes a lot of weed-
ing and watering to cultivate a flower.