The Practice of the Wild

I’m reading a great book of essays by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder, called The Practice of the Wild. It is as poignant as it is prescient. Gretel Ehrlich calls it “an exquisite, far-sighted articulation of what freedom, wildness, goodness, and grace mean, using the lessons of the planet to teach us how to live.” Wes Jackson (another favorite of mine) says, “I have always found it difficult to imagine this century without the life and work of Gary Snyder. After reading this collection of essays, I now find it impossible.” Needless to say, I highly recommend it.

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. We must try not to be stingy, or to exploit others. There will be enough pain in the world as it is.

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.

Fall

The sun surrenders to shadows
The clouds come marching forth
With orders to claim the lily’s last breath
As a gift to the god of the storm

Mighty elms, their branches atremble
The leaves are withered and worn
In the air there hangs the sweet smell of death
For the purpose of being reborn

Brown & Perry: The Mercy of the Fallen

Greg Brown

Michael Perry

In an earlier post, you might have heard me lament, in my whiny and ungrateful way, the fact that I did not and certainly could not have the singing voice of someone like Greg Brown. I had recently been introduced to Greg Brown’s music by Michael Perry in his book ‘Truck’ in which he describes Brown’s voice and music and their effects on the listener in a most eloquent and picturesque way.

Well, this morning I came across an old issue of No Depression that’s been in our bathroom for probably two years and I saw that it had an article about Greg Brown written by none other than Michael Perry. Not sure why I’d missed it before.

I read it, loved it, and want to share it with you because not only does it aptly praise Greg Brown as a great artist and a complicated man but because Perry’s writing always has a way of sucking us into the moment, exposing our need for a shared redemption, and reminding us just how redemptive art, place, community, and truth can be.

Enjoy.

When as a young child you are called by the Lord to rise from your metal folding chair in the basement of the Moose Hall and commit your life to Christ upon the commencement of the final chorus of ‘Close Thy Heart No More’, you remain forever susceptible to the lexicon of faith.

All subsequent straying will not alter this fact.

You are hooked on the thee and thou, and always will be. You will toddle along into a life of scuffing and sinning and just keep on a-wandering, and one day you will hear someone railing on those scary fundamentalist Christians and you will pick up your bumbling agnostical head from its existential dreamland, and you will say, Hey – those are my people you’re talking about.

And you will look back down the path you have trodden, and you will not be able to feature the circumstances under which you would return to faith and fold, but likewise you cannot imagine where you would stand lacking the reckoning points set by both.

Having wrassled this contradiction every day since the Moose Hall, you will remain peeved with those who think you left the flock because you are a silly little sheep, but you will be grateful for the foundation the church provided, even as you stack your bricks in the sand.

There is a certain vocabulary you learn only through attrition and heartache, and Greg Brown speaks it. His music is suffused with what singer Dar Williams calls ‘the mercy of the fallen.’ Wisdom can arise from contradiction — Covenant, one of Brown’s loveliest albums, is a testament to enduring love written by a man heading into his third marriage. The fallible prophets of my youth cured me of confusing the singer with the song long ago. For all I know Greg Brown is a difficult angel or a randy scoundrel, but that music of his is dead true, and I am eager to hear him speak.

Click to read the rest…

In Defense of the Repairman

A couple days ago, when visiting one of our favorite coffee shops, Moses and I locked ourselves out of the car with the headlights still on. We realized this only after spending an hour or so inside, so of course the car battery was dead. We called GEICO’s roadside assistance number and then waited for over two hours for the responder to show up. I probably would have been more peeved by this delay – and, for that matter, all the other times we’ve felt slighted by auto repairmen in the recent past – had I not, in the interval, been reading Matthew Crawford’s ‘Shop Class as Soulcraft’. In fact, one particular passage I read that morning was this one:

Constantly seeking self-affirmation, the narcissist views everything as an extension of his will, and therefore has only a tenuous grasp on the world of objects as something independent. He is prone to magical thinking and delusions of omnipotence. A repairman, on the other hand, puts himself in the service of others, and fixes the things they depend on. His relationship to objects enacts a more solid sort of command, based on real understanding. For this very reason, his work also chastens the easy fantasy of mastery that permeates modern culture. The repairman has to begin each job by getting outside his own head and noticing things; he has to look carefully and listen to the ailing machine.

The repairman is called in when the smooth operation of our world has been disrupted, and at such moments our dependence on things normally taken for granted (for example, a toilet that flushes) is brought to vivid awareness. For this very reason, the repairman’s presence may make the narcissist uncomfortable. The problem isn’t so much that he is dirty, or uncouth. Rather, he seems to pose a challenge to our self-understanding that is somehow fundamental. We’re not as free and independent as we thought.

Choir of Young Believers

A new favorite. I’m bummed I missed them when they played at the Holocene this last week:

Yesterday Morning in 140 Characters or Less:

Note to self: Spend more days fishing waist-deep in the Columbia (Gorge). What a beautiful and meditative space! PS: Catch fish next time.

Dreams of a Sublime Uneventfulness

I’m addicted to staying up to date and being in the know. I’m addicted to news. There are worse things to be addicted to, you say. And I guess you’re probably right. But just as other addictions, it serves to distract me from reality – even as it tries to present the same – and the business of living.

Well, you know what I long for right now – at least at this very moment?

I long for the life of the whaler.

The paragraph below, from Moby Dick, resonates with me greatly. You could tattoo Melville’s words, ‘dreamy meditative man,’ across my forehead and it wouldn’t be entirely out of place (in fact it would probably fold neatly into the creases of my furrowed brow) so I guess it’s no wonder I find his description of the whaler’s life ‘delightful’:

In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful… For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner – for all your meats for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.

aaahh… Sounds sublime, doesn’t it?

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

It’s not often that positive stories from Malawi receive international attention so I thought I’d share this one:

William Kamkwamba is a young man from rural Malawi who at age 14 built an electricity-producing windmill from scrap materials with the aid of only a library book.

The video below is a short film that tells his story. Here is an interview William did with The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, here is his TED Talk, and his blog can be found here.

War is Peace??

Well, I guess when one considers that Alfred Nobel was an inventor and manufacturer of weapons and a war profiteer, the ‘Peace’ Prize going to a Commander-in-Chief who wages war even now is maybe not so paradoxical after all. What say you?

Wise men pierce this rotten diction

“As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols… And as this is the first language, so is it the last.

This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish…

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires – the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise – and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God.

These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses, for a powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of cities.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson