The Nature of Things

The Sioux idea of living creatures is that trees, buffalo and men are temporary energy swirls, turbulance patterns... that's an early intuitive recognition of energy as a quality of matter. But that's an old insight, you know, extremely old - probably a Paleolithic shaman's insight. You find that perception registered so many ways in archaic and primitive lore. I would say that it is probably the most basic insight into the nature of things, and that our more common, recent Occidental view of the universe as consisting of fixed things is out of the main stream, a deviation from basic human perception.

~Gary Snyder