The Old Ways
1 journaler for this copy...
I put this in "Philosophy" but I could have said poetry, myth or literature.
brief excerpt from David Burner's Making Peace with the Sixties
"In Snyder's writings or the sixties, nature, sex, the unconscious--basic materials for much of the counterculture--take, the place of the exacting personal encounters with the outer and inner world that he had once sought in Zen discipline. Ecology and the tribal community, the need for humankind to relearn intimate connection with a particular place and soil, are the essential themes of his essays in The Old Ways, collected in 1972. Of the knowledge that a people acquires of its locality, Snyder writes, "a spirit of what it was to be there evolved, that spoke of a direct sense of relation to the 'land'-which really means, the totality, of the local bio-region system, from cirrus clouds to leaf-mold." A knowledge of place contributes to knowledge of self, for the self is composite. "Part of you is out there waiting to come into you, and another part of you is behind you, and the 'just this' of the ever-present moment holds all the transitory little selves in its mirror." Such is the wisdom of peoples who have learned to keep within their ecological limits. In dark contrast stand the imperial peoples, who have discovered that by invading another ecological system they can drain energy from it. From wisdom comes a perception of the soundness of the whole universe. Snyder tells of the concept in India of the universe-as-energy as a voice, a song stirring within the still and silent Brahma: mantra chanting is a chanting of the fundamental syllables of that voice, a return to the first energy of the universe."
brief excerpt from David Burner's Making Peace with the Sixties
"In Snyder's writings or the sixties, nature, sex, the unconscious--basic materials for much of the counterculture--take, the place of the exacting personal encounters with the outer and inner world that he had once sought in Zen discipline. Ecology and the tribal community, the need for humankind to relearn intimate connection with a particular place and soil, are the essential themes of his essays in The Old Ways, collected in 1972. Of the knowledge that a people acquires of its locality, Snyder writes, "a spirit of what it was to be there evolved, that spoke of a direct sense of relation to the 'land'-which really means, the totality, of the local bio-region system, from cirrus clouds to leaf-mold." A knowledge of place contributes to knowledge of self, for the self is composite. "Part of you is out there waiting to come into you, and another part of you is behind you, and the 'just this' of the ever-present moment holds all the transitory little selves in its mirror." Such is the wisdom of peoples who have learned to keep within their ecological limits. In dark contrast stand the imperial peoples, who have discovered that by invading another ecological system they can drain energy from it. From wisdom comes a perception of the soundness of the whole universe. Snyder tells of the concept in India of the universe-as-energy as a voice, a song stirring within the still and silent Brahma: mantra chanting is a chanting of the fundamental syllables of that voice, a return to the first energy of the universe."
