Abigail Thomas, The Practice of the Wild

Pgs. 3-25 The Etiquette of Freedom

(The Compact)
The first story of Louie, who is one of three people who can speak Nisenan, but won’t meet up with one of his fellow few Nisenan speakers because of social concerns between the families, strikes one of my cords.
This cord is of compulsive tendencies (I think) where if something is very few, endangered, and extinction overshadows its future, I feel this frustration and impatience that I don’t want to accept a legacy but want to preserve, replenish and aid in not losing. Well in this case it’s perhaps not extinction but the loss of people with particular specialty that comes with perspective and personal experiences that are alive with the very people that have them. Not to say that Nisenan will die and disappear and with them their language and culture, but a language of three people perhaps is not going to be spoken once the people are gone. I’m not trying to convey, either, that these few people need to start a Nisenan school, but only just out of my compulsion, I wonder why they can’t overlook the family obstacle and revel together in their language as the few. But at last I concede that Mr. Snyder is right in that the language of culture and values overrides the Nisenan communication language, and so instead these two Nisenan speakers are indeed reveling just with their culture language rather than their speaking language.
This also shows that I had before assumed speaking language as an icon or poster face of a culture or a people...

“We also see that we must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow human beings 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.”
I just didn’t want this quote to be ignored in this entry as I have –truth-something to respect and aspire to achieve honesty in...last sentence is a straightforward truth to me and the whole thing is sooo good...Interesting that he mentions this after appreciating some aspects of ecology and evolution (4 Snyder)

Basically Snyder seems to sum up that everything is natural and wild describes the condition of certain things from our perspective (He also goes on, to detail that wild is also where people have not taken away from the potential of all the living forms that could otherwise live/ exist in the area; like people cities).

It’s interesting that he mentions that people developing towards towns, cities, even just being on land that had been cleared off of many communities of species for space in agriculture, had also been developing more disassociated with what was and it’s once full potential and distance was created from people to their environment. He goes into a cyclic history as man develops for himself and ho the relationship between himself and environment change (12-3 Snyder).

He points out that the wild can invade a city and other such humanly developed places just as the human developed places invade the wild (14-5 Snyder). Like grass and moss penetrating the cracks of sidewalks.

“Please don’t repeat this to the uninitiated” is a good antidote for people who would I guess otherwise tell others shortly that they can be wild without also explaining to the others what is meant by wild (24 Snyder). I just like this statement in a humorous way, it was funny, I laughed.