Ecological Politics and Riprap

It's obviously human hubris to think we can destroy the planet, can destroy life. It's just another exaggeration of ourselves.

 A kind of bottom line is that all human activity is as trivial as anything else. We can humbly acknowledge that and excuse ourselves from exaggerating our importance, even as a threat, and also recognize the scale and the beauty of things. And then go to work. Don't imagine that we're doing ecological politics to save the world. We're doing ecological politics to save ourselves, to save our souls. It's a personal exercise in character and in manners. It's a matter of etiquette. It's a matter of living right. It's not that the planet requires us to be good to it. It's that we must do it because it's an aesthetic and ethical choice.

 Those issues are all real, but they're not total. And the power of the universe far surpasses any damage we can do to it.

Gary Snyder, Tricycle Magazine interview, adapted from Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism and Living in Places, by Julia Martin and Gary Snyder 

If you're like me, you feel a rising panic about the state of the ecological world. You feel inadequate to the task and perhaps even complicit. You feel like your thoughts are free-floating and ineffectual. Your attempts to reduce your carbon footprint, to tread lightly, to support environmental causes seem paltry in the face of population explosions, oil-slicked animals along the coast, a contaminated food supply, and an over-medicated population whose urine and feces are laced with chemicals that are then flushed into the water and recycled, squirted from our breasts into babies' mouths and onward. That was a hellish sentence, no?

I read Gary Snyder's provocative words, excerpted above, and felt, if not comforted, then galvanized. I'd love to hear what you think of them -- even if you have no Buddhist leanings.

Here's a Gary Snyder poem -- one of my favorites:


Riprap

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
               placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
               in space and time:
Solidityof bark, leaf, or wall
               riprap of things.
Cobble of milky way.
               straying planets.
These poems, people,
               lost  ponies with
Dragging saddles -
               and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like and endless
                four-dimensional
Game of Go.
                ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
                 a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
                 with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
                 all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

Gary Snyder

We could all use a shower of poetry

Yosemite, August 2011

Riprap

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

             placed solid, by hands   

In choice of place, set

Before the body of the mind

             in space and time:

Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall

             riprap of things:

Cobble of milky way,

             straying planets,

These poems, people,

             lost ponies with

Dragging saddles—

             and rocky sure-foot trails.   

The worlds like an endless   

             four-dimensional

Game of Go.

             ants and pebbles

In the thin loam, each rock a word   

             a creek-washed stone

Granite: ingrained

             with torment of fire and weight   

Crystal and sediment linked hot

             all change, in thoughts,   

As well as things.

Gary Snyder, from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems

Friday Surf Report - Things I Like

• This is very, very cool: The Car Photo

• I adore this photo (look at the prayer beads wound in there!)

via the inimitable recuerda mi corazon

• Number 19 from Gary Snyder's book Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems

Once at Cold Mountain, troubles cease --

No more tangled, hung-up mind.

I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff,

Taking whatever comes, like a drifting boat.

Cold Mountain, or Han-Shan, lived during the T'ang dynasty, approximately A.D. 627-650. Snyder describes him as "a mountain madman in an old Chinese line of ragged hermits." Han-Shan lived alone for most of his life in a mountain hut. See, here I am working in my escape desires -- I vant to be alone.

• Another reason to eat chocolate cake -- and move on.

• My beautiful blogger friend Karen Gerstenberger of Gberger has just published a book titled Because of Katie about her family's heartbreaking yet entirely profound journey with their daughter Katie who was diagnosed with cancer as a twelve year old. I have had the enormous privilege of getting to know Karen over the years, and her strength and deep spirituality are a constant source of inspiration to me. I am certain that her book will be treasured. You can order your very own copy on Amazon in a couple of weeks or on Karen's site right now!

• I loved this conversation between Krista Tippett and Kevin Kling. Here's what Tippett's blog OnBeing says:  In a face-to-face conversation from the studios of American Public Media and Minnesota Public Radio, Krista Tippett will talk to this American humorist and writer about confronting and embracing these physical challenges and his own mortality, and the will to create rather than despair. Through his work and his personal story, we’ll focus on his work as an artist, the importance of humor and craft in his spiritual life, and how he finds meaning in the world around him.

Video streaming by Ustream

Culture Vulture

I felt a bit like a vulture yesterday, swooping down and into a local Borders bookstore that is closing and had a big sale on its remaining merchandise. I wandered the fiction and poetry aisles, lured by the 30%-50% off signs, and picked up copies of Yeats' The Tower, Gary Snyder's Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, and Lucille Clifton's Voices. Then I walked across the street and ate crispy onion rings dipped in barbecue sauce at The Waffle while reading Anne Roiphe's memoir Art and Madness on my Kindle (another blow to local bookstores) and then I walked across the street again to see the Danish movie In a Better World. I did all of this after breaking down in my house and running out the door in tears, leaving my children (one disabled, one covered in pox and the other just a pain) with the babysitter who had come to watch Sophie. I gunned my car to Hollywood with the accompaniment of violins, and after four or five hours came home, feeling only slightly chagrined and much relieved.