A Mac in His Backpack

From the Department of Unexpected Delights (and on this day of much anticipated Apple-related revelations), here's an amazing New York Times article, complete with an amazing poem by the Very Great Gary Snyder about his Mac entitled "Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh."

"Bees and busy people."

Been reading the great & strange Philip Whalen lately, & encountered this gem on nature's simultaneities, which can best be enjoyed for its crackling sound effects & pools of meaning by reading aloud:

FOR ALBERT SAIJO

Fireweed now—
Burnt mountain day
Sunny crackle silence bracken
Huckleberry silver logs bears
Bees and busy people.

Rainy mountain years
Trees again—
Green gloom fern here
Moss duff sorrel
Deer sleep.

Tree fire people weed:
Bright and dark this mountain ground.


by Philip Whalen
(Zen poet &—can you tell?—college roommate of Gary Snyder)

Bonus Track: Whalen (center) with friends Ginsberg & Burroughs, way back when.

The Larger Sanity

An example of what Gary Snyder might call "the larger sanity":

A man with vertigo scales the 52-story New York Times building without rope, harness, or parachute to make a statement about the urgency of global warming.

Thank you, Alain, for popping over from Paris to remind us of what we already know and aren't yet doing nearly enough about.

Alain Robert: The Solution is Simple

Zen Gardening

Check out Dharma in the Dirt, a funky piece in the New York Times about Zen Gardening and one of the organic gardening movement's progenitors—as always, don't miss ye olde slideshow. (Do we love the Times online? Yes, we do!)
Speaking of Zen, belated congrats to that magnificent beacon of "the larger sanity," Gary Snyder, on his recent win of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. Bravo, good sir!

Quoth the prize-givers: “Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself. His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation.”

I'm grateful for all Snyder has taught me with his words, and glad to see this recognition bestowed. I remain hopeful that the ultimate lifetime achievement award will be Snyder living to see enough people hearing and acting upon his wisdom to turn this mess around before it's too late.

Thunderbird American Indian Dancers

My friend Eva treated me to an amazing evening of Native American dance at the Theater for the New City last night. Featured—and you still have time to experience this for yourself—was the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers. (Both photos of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers are by Jonathan Slaff; more can be seen here.)
The performance program spanned Turtle Island (a.k.a. North America), with drumming, storytelling, and exquisite dances from the native peoples of Alaska, the Northwest Coast, the Southwest, the Northeast, and the Great Plains.

Eva has written about the event and provided links to tickets and related information on her blog, InfiniteBody. If you miss the Thunderbird festivities this year, there's always next year; the event—which raises scholarship funds for Native American students—takes place annually.

For me, highlights of the evening included the Robin Dance (a celebration of spring), the bedazzling Hoop Dance (though safely seated, I almost tripped and fell just watching this amazing feat wherein the dancers appear to float, hop, fly and swim in and out of several hand-held hoops), and the Butterfly Dance, which expresses gratitude for the beautiful gifts nature provides.

Nice synchronicity, too, with elements of Gary Snyder's endlessly re-readable essay, Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder, which I happen to be re-reading at the moment.

In this magnificent essay from Back on the Fire (just out in paperback), Snyder writes of performance as "currency"—big picture currency, payback for all nature provides to us, a potential vehicle for paying our respects (as we so rarely do) for the abundant, all-encompassing gifts nature bestows upon us daily, nightly, always. Snyder writes:

"One time in Alaska a young woman asked me, 'If we have made such good use of animals, eating them, singing about them, drawing them, riding them, and dreaming about them, what do they get back from us?' An excellent question, directly on the point of etiquette and propriety, and from the animals' side. I told her, 'The Ainu say that the deer, salmon, and bear like our music and are fascinated by our languages. So we sing to the fish or the game, speak words to them, say grace. We do ceremonies and rituals. Performance is currency in the deep world's gift economy.' I went on to say I felt that nonhuman nature is basically well inclined toward humanity and only wishes modern people were more reciprocal, not so bloody. The animals are drawn to us, they see us as good musicians, and they think we have cute ears.

"The human contribution to the planetary ecology might be our entertaining craziness, our skills as musicians and performers, our awe-inspiring dignity as ritualists and solemn ceremonialists—because that is what seems to delight the watching wild world."

In reading this intriguing passage yesterday afternoon, I found myself charmed, but unconvinced by Snyder's thesis. After refreshing my understanding of "performance," "ritual," "good musicianship" and the ceremonial human-animal connect at the Thunderbird event last evening, I can better appreciate what Snyder was alluding to here. Native American culture is so exceedingly marginalized in New York City that is it easy to forget—or never know—how diverse, creatively potent, psychically fulfilling, and environmentally appropriate the art and culture of Turtle Island's indigenous cultures were and are. I'm grateful for the reminder, which—like all sorely needed reminders—comes at the perfect time.

By that I mean that with spring on the way, I'm giving a good deal of thought to the questions of "etiquette and propriety" in relation to the honeybees, seeking to help them thrive without harsh interventions, going beyond the mentality of "robbing the hive," and finding workable ways of serving the bees' interests and according them the respect they deserve.

Influences like Gary Snyder's writings and last night's offering of dance, story, and philosophy help greatly in this regard.

Blog Action Day/Thought of the Day

“What we refer to as nature or the ‘environment’ or the wild world is our endangered habitat and home, and we are its problem species. Living in it well with each other and with all the other beings is our ancient challenge. In this time of New World Disorder, we need to find the trick of weaving civilized culture and wild nature into the fabric of the future. This will be both art and science. We can take heart, however, from the fact that the actual physical world sets conditions that are some of the strongest guards against ignorant extremism and fanaticism. ‘Get real! Get a life!’ is the daily message of Mother Nature.

Stay the course, my friends.”

—Gary Snyder, “Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder”