Incredibly Wild

“Dry weeds and gravel dug into Gary Snyder’s thighs as he sat by the side of an empty Nevada highway. In September 1951, nobody’s car had air-conditioning, and few drivers dared venture into the blasting heat and emptiness of the Great American Desert. Snyder was hitchhiking to graduate school in Indiana. Alone on the road, sitting in silence and stillness, going nowhere, he had time for reflection. He watched the fierce, clear light saturate the air and overwhelm the distant mountains with radiance. He felt the hot wind stirring his hair and settling his mind. He reached into his bag, took out D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series, and read it on the roadside.

As he waited for cars that didn’t come, he immersed himself in Suzuki’s words. Something in their thoughtful and meditative pace stirred an inclination to experience what they offered. Snyder crossed his legs and began a little homemade Zen meditation. After a car stopped for him, he continued to read Suzuki’s books and practice meditation on his own at Indiana University, teaching himself correct posture by studying Buddhist statues. By the end of the first semester, he felt he had been catapulted into a larger realm. Turning away from a career as an anthropologist, he resolved to go back to San Francisco and write the poetry that called to him.

Snyder’s voracious interest in humankind’s potential led him into graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1952, to study Oriental languages. Suzuki had shown him the common ground shared by Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Snyder translated Chinese and Japanese Zen poetry and read everything that promised illumination. “For us, in our energy of the fifties, early Buddhism, Laozi [Lao-tze], Gandhi, Thoreau, Kropotkin, and Zen were all one teaching,” he later recalled. “We stood for original human nature and the spontaneous creative spirit. Dr. Suzuki’s Zen presentation of the ‘original life force,’ the ‘life-impulse,’ ‘the enlivening spirit of the Buddha’—the emphasis on personal direct experience, seemed to lead in the same direction…

Snyder, meticulous and down-to-earth, had the makings of a serious Zen practitioner. Seeking Zen in its homeland, Snyder got himself to Japan in 1956 and spent most of the next twelve years there. Put off at first by the toughness and strenuousness of traditional Japanese Zen, he stayed on, translating, writing poetry, and practicing in sesshin (formal meditation retreats) at Shokokuji and Daitokuji in Kyoto…”
~ Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats

“One June afternoon in the early seventies I walked through the crackly gold grasses to a neat but unpainted cabin at the back end of a ranch near the drainage of the South Yuba in northern California. It had no glass in the windows, no door. It was shaded by a huge Black Oak. The house looked abandoned and my friend, a student of native California literature and languages, walked right in. Off to the side, at a bare wooden table, with a mug of coffee, sat a solid old gray-haired Indian man. He acknowledged us, greeted my friend, and gravely offered us instant coffee and canned milk. He was fine, he said, but he would never go back to a VA hospital again. From now on if he got sick he would stay where he was. He liked being home. We spoke for some time of people and places along the western slope of the northern Sierra Nevada, the territories of Concow and Nisenan people.

Finally my friend broke his good news: "Louie, I have found another person son who speaks Nisenan." There were perhaps no more than three people alive speaking Nisenan at that time, and Louie was one of them. "Who?" Louie asked. He told her name. "She lives back of Oroville. I can bring her here, and you two can speak." "I know her from way back," Louie said. "She wouldn't want to come over here. I don't think I should see her. Besides, her family and mine never did get along."

That took my breath away. Here was a man who would not let the mere threat of cultural extinction stand in the way of his (and her) values. To well-meaning sympathetic white people this response is almost incomprehensible. In the world of his people, never over-populated, rich in acorn, deer, salmon, and flicker feathers, to cleave to such purity, to be perfectionists about matters of family or clan, were affordable luxuries. Louie and his fellow Nisenan had more important business with each other than conversations. versations. I think he saw it as a matter of keeping their dignity, their pride, and their own ways-regardless of what straits they had fallen upon-until the end.

Coyote and Ground Squirrel do not break the compact they have with each other that one must play predator and the other play game. In the wild a baby Black-tailed Hare gets maybe one free chance to run across a meadow without looking up. There won't be a second. The sharper the knife, the cleaner the line of the carving. We can appreciate the elegance of the forces that shape life and the world, that have shaped every line of our bodies-teeth and nails, nipples and eyebrows. We also see that we must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings…

Such are the lessons of the wild. The school where these lessons can be learned, the realms of caribou and elk, elephant and rhinoceros, orca and walrus, are shrinking day by day. Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat- and the old, old habitat of humans -falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies. If the lad or lass is among us who knows where the secret heart of this Growth-Monster is hidden, let them please tell us where to shoot the arrow that will slow it down. And if the secret heart stays secret and our work is made no easier, I for one will keep working for wildness day by day.

"Wild and free." An American dream-phrase loosing images: a long-maned stallion racing across the grasslands, a V of Canada Geese high and honking, a squirrel chattering and leaping limb to limb overhead in an oak. It also sounds like an ad for a Harley-Davidson… To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are-painful, impermanent, open, imperfect - and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us. For in a fixed universe there would be no freedom. With that freedom we improve the campsite, teach children, oust tyrants. The world is nature, and in the long run inevitably wild…”

~ Gary Snyder. The Practice of the Wild: With a New Preface by the Author