New Yorker profile of Gary Snyder  Zen Master: Gary Snyder and the art of life is the title of a profile of the West Coast poet in the October 20, 2008 edition of The New Yorker. Snyder is one of my heroes. It's hard to put into words what he has meant to me and how I live my life. He's a Buddhist, but as he says in the article "Being a Buddhist doesn't necessarily mean you have to be a good Buddhist."

Unlike a "good" Buddhist, he takes an occasional drink of alchohol (he likes boilermakers at dinnertime) and he eats meat, although he does not kill what he eats (he has "a twenty-five-year-old Cab I'm saving for venision—for when we get a deer again on the road. In the winter season, I always drive with a giant black garbage bag in the car and a hunting knife or two.")

His poetry is simple and descriptive; reflective of the simple life he lives in the woods of the Sierra Nevada north of San Francisco. He bought the place many years ago and while I get the sense that he travels often, he has remained in that place, getting to know the spirit of the land and being involved in making it a better place.

Inherent in Snyder's philosophy is the concept of place and community:

We are all indigenous to this planet, this garden we are being called on by nature and history to reinhabit in good spirit. To restore the land one must live and work in a place. The place will welcome whomever approaches it with respect and attention. To work in a place is to bond to a place: people who work together in a place become a community, in time, grows a culture. To restore the wild is to restore culture.

posted by Bruce Wright at 10:22 AM #