It’s pure coincidence that he should appear in this series on Earth Day, but it’s totally fitting.
The tumultuous spring of 1970, when the first Earth Day was observed, was also when I first saw someone sitting in deep meditation. The figure was in lotus position under a beech tree totally motionless for perhaps a half hour while I waited for my girlfriend at the street corner nearby. My inner reaction was hostile, wondering how anybody could withdraw from the world amid all of the conflict around us at the time. Only later did I put the events together – Gary Snyder, just back from years of Zen practice in Japan, was giving a reading on campus. I even admired some of his calligraphy in a display in the Student Union. And, as I would discover, he was a leading activist on progressive fronts.
About a year later, when I took up yoga and its meditation, I had already begun reading his poetry and was struck by what seemed wild construction. What I eventually detected was how precisely it fit an American voice yet moved on Asian meters with utmost economy and, in his case, clarity.
About a year later, I was living in a yoga ashram, a monastic community not that different from the Zen monasteries he had known in Japan. In addition, one of his essays told of visiting the ashram of our teacher’s teacher in India. It was perhaps the best portrayal of Sivananda I’ve yet read, free of the usual guru adoration.
Similar flashes continued as I returned to Indiana, where he had done graduate studies, and then on to his native Washington state, where he had long been a much better mountaineer than I ever would be. Still, the high country he celebrated was both real and transcendental, even in my briefer experiences. His familiarity with Indigenous tribes also informed my own encounters while living at the edge of the Yakama reservation.
I relate more of this in a poem in my Elders Hold chapbook, should you be interested.
Or, for a thinly veiled biography of him before he left for Japan, there’s Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.
Much of my writing, poetry and fiction, has concentrated on place itself, and that’s been something Snyder, too, has done. While I have moved independently of his example, I have been indebted and inspired.
Hari Om Tat Sat!
Jnana's Red Barn 