Catherine Greenfield-- War and Peace-- In reference to Three By Anne Dillard

"Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone os a radical scheme, the brain child of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.... No form is to gruesome, no behavior too grotesque." p. 64 Three By Anne Dillard.

One thing about war in nature is that everything is killed for a purpose. "Waste not, want not." In nature, wives kill husbands in order bring babies into the world. Armies war to gain resources, and then use the bodies of the slain and of the captured as food and community-fuel. Flies are trapped, helpless, in webs strung with doom for one and lunch for another. Consumption is the main goal. Prosperity, the hope for tomorrow.

In the world of man, wives kill husbands because the husband ran off to the gal down the block and brought the wrong baby into the world. In the world of nature, there is no wrong baby. There is only life. In the world of man, armies fight to gain resources, bury their dead, torture the captured, and leave the economy in shambles at the end. In the world of man, economics mean food. Economics mean prosperity. Prosperity is everything. In the world of man, hobos are trapped, helpless, in webs strung with humiliation and degradation. But, in the world of men, no one is fed in their starvation. No stomach is more full because one street baby died from an empty belly. They are not pray. It isn't Darwinism that sticks their toes out of the holes in their shoes-- the weak aren't losing. The weak aren't dying. The weak also aren't fueling the strong. Something is wrong in the world of man. What is wrong?

Our natural economics are way off. If we wanted to do it right, we'd be eating the weak, using the poor to raise ourselves higher. Some would say we are already doing this. Than what's with unemployment rates? What's with starvation rates? What's with the homeless? If we were truly natural, then, would be be taking advantage of the weak, as a spider takes advantage of the weakness of a fly? Would we, then, be counted as cruel, or thrifty?

What causes mankind to be struck dumb by "devastation," that causes us to flinch when a mantis snatches a beetle and chomps into its oil-slick back? Don't we do the same? Do we do the same? At what point do we stop being thrifty, and start being heartless? Is nature heartless? To be natural, would that mean that we have to be heartless? Is there a give and take, an acceptance of demise, in the natural world, that makes it less cruel in the eyes of those who worship it? The fly struggles for freedom! It does not want to die! Is that acceptance? Is that cruelty?

Where do we, if you will, get off making such vapid generalizations without knowing what we mean? Dillard's right-- Nature is a "spend-thrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent" (67). But can we allow that ourselves? Are we too kind, too empathetic, to allow ourselves to have a spend-thrift economy? Or do we already have one, and fight it down with all of our intellectual might? What, in short, is going on here!?

D. Ryan Foster- Nature in Us, Response To Snyder's The Practice of the Wild

April 22

“One should not…hope to leave the political quagg behind…The purpose of such studies and hikes is to be able to come back to the lowlands and see all the land about us…as part of the same territory- never totally ruined, never completely unnatural.” (Snyder, pg. 101).

I always was skeptical of nature worship or people who were nature enthusiasts. It was something interesting that they set nature apart from everything humans touched. Like the Preservationists of the early 1900s they seek pristine untouched nature, something uncorrupted by humans. I never liked this much as the modern definition of nature is the base state. In this nature is wild and uncontrolled and in such has a poetic beauty, but if humans are not part of this base state, in fact seen as invaders upon it, then (since there is nothing below a base state) humans must be above nature in some manner. This arrogance of the philosophy inherently taints any love or worship of nature as being somehow better than human as distinguishing ourselves from being natural beings is clearly antithesis to the concept. This was my original skepticism with Snyder, allowing me to take (as I do with most works) his philosophy with a grain of salt. However, this line on page 101 points out the very thing I've always struggled with and is to show that as a deer treats its wilderness, humans as natural beings, have created their own form of wilderness that lives inside the land even when prospected and paved over. But then one has to ask if that too is natural then what defines a wilderness from the preconceptions we've always known as nature/wilderness? I think to reconcile this we look to the power of a land. The ability to support life, or the ability to extinguish life, or perhaps even the ability to make life run smoothly and comfortably as the wilderness of a suburban side street. I have to reference Sinclair's The Jungle here as a perfect example of how even an urban environment can be seen as a wilderness unto itself and it too has its sacred places in the forms of the family room, the child's playground, the school, the library, or the local synagogue or other holy building. The human wilderness certainly has its rituals and it certainly can be tread upon without being experienced and very well meets the requirements to having its own sacred landscapes. So the next time I see that small patch of woods behind a house, I may be sad to see it go down, but I will consider the possibilities of nature to continue in a modern human way in the townhouses that will be thrown up where tall trees used to stand.

Catherine Greenfield-- Something to be Said-- In reference to The Practice of the Wild.

"As a contemporary thought we might also wonder how it is for those whose childhood landscape was being ripped up by bulldozers, or whose family moving about made it all a blur. " p.28, The Practice of the Wild-- Snyder

There is something to be said about people who have never had a permanant hearth. Because I have never had a patch of earth to call my own singular home, I have always seen the world, as a whole, as my home. I attatch myself to wherever I am at any given point. I glorify in the beauty of the place, and lament in its distruction, even if I have only been among that piece of wild for a short time. I cannot afford to tie my heartstrings to a particular tree or mountain range; nipping those ties every few months or years would be too much for me to handle. I would have scarred and calloused heartstrings if I let myself give my whole to one particular spot. Therefore, all things, to me, are sacred. All places, all things, and all people. Instead of being singularly attached, I love every place with equal portions of my whole heart, whether the landscape in question is natural or man-made. I am just as touched by one place as another, but that doesn't mean I am less touched as someone who calls that landscape his or her home. I am simply touched differently. Maybe not all of the crevices of my heart imbibe in the glory of that one place alone. Maybe I am not completely stone-drunk from it. But I am, at the very least, severely inebriated by it. Too, I rarely tire of a particular place, because I know I probably won't see it again. No place is a monotony. As a result of this, I do not have to travel far or hike long distances to feel immersed in the words of the world. All of its languages and accents are plesant to the ears and eyes of my heart. Therefore, I do not pity myself or my ever-moving feet, nor do I pity others like me. I also don't see myself as superior, or count myself as more lucky for being able to commune wherever I am. I feel that it is with an equal heart that those who stay and those who go can love and breathe and be with the natural world. I feel that it is ignorant of Snyder, or of anyone, to count a goer as unlucky, and a stayer as lucky, by those reasons alone. After all-- there are plenty of people who have spent their whole lives in a place if immense beauty, and still have never experienced the glory of the place, just as there are people whose travels have taken them far and wide, and yet they feel no joy in the world. Those are the unlucky ones.

Catherine Greenfield-- Stay, Foul Beastie!-- In refernce to The Practice of the Wild

"We can accept each other as barefoot equals sleeping on the same ground. We can give up hoping to be eternal and quit fighting dirt. We can chase off mosquitoes and fence out varmints without hating them." -p.26, The Practice of the Wild --Snyder

In my culture, it is not completely unheard of to accept my cat as my equal, or my dog, or my horse, or my pet duck or even fish. But a mosquito as my equal? How the rubber-souled hordes laugh at such a concept! A rat? A cockroach? Ha! Those are the sorts of creatures we banish with our poisons and neck-snapping, skin-melting, fur-burning traps. It is against these tiny tyrants, whose mere existence may very well threaten our entire lives (what with the way we attack them, soldiers at arms, with our dust buster machine guns and miracle foam bombs), that we fight with such exhuberence. We vaccuum up these tiny-footed "pests" with the same machenes we use to suck away the decomposed bits of nature, the brown phleghm of the wild, that we track in on our running shoes and flip-flops. We seperate outselves as far as possible from everthing that sustains itself with the blood and flesh of the still-living (as if we, orselves, do not): mosquitoes, horseflies, worms, mold. We run in fear from anything with more than a man-made prerequisite number of legs. Although we are all a part of this giant, rotating rock, coated liberally in the various stages of life and death, we cannot stop ourselves from feeling removed. As we hurtle through endless space, we feel apart, somehow. Do we forget how much a part we are, because we feel we are above those who tread in the dust? Do we not remember that that selfsame dust comes from our slowly decomposing arms and legs, which shed, like snakes, our own living exterior every second of every day? Do we not remember that, in ways both figurative and literal, the dirt is as much made of decomposed human flesh as it is the creatures we despise? Or would we, in our haughty attempt at ignorance, simply rather not remember?

D. Ryan Foster- Searching for Religion as a Religion

April 21

Few people think they have all the answers when it comes to religion. I see so many people with so many views and I think to myself how can I know what is right and what isn't? I struggled with this for a long time until I found this conglomerative faith that is based in the teachings of Christ but hardly follows the perceived tenets of Christianity. I never had a name for what I truly longed to be, beyond the Ancient Greek definition of a natural man (which has very little to do with what people percieve as nature now.) The mention in class of the perpetual pilgrim interested me and spawned this idea in my head of a search for religion being a religion unto itself. It gave new definition to what I believed my personal religion might become.
Where a normal pilgrim may be searching for a definite place or a constant known, the pilgrim who searches for the sake of searching revels in what is unknown and inconstant. As such the idea of change and growth of knowledge is likely to correlate expanding perspectives and viewpoints. This lends this type of pilgrim to travel and expanding their physical boundaries in order to gain the perspective for their spiritual knowledge to expand as well. This inconsistency of place seems to fit nicely with the joy of having inconstant knowledge and to learn new beliefs in order to expand your own. When I apply this idea to myself, I ask that if I'm piecing together the beliefs of everything I travel and find and keep what speaks to me and leave the rest than am I not playing God in creating this patchwork religion? I think that would be egotistical on my part but also presumptuous on the part of anyone who would accuse that. I feel that a guiding hand shows you what you need to see, perhaps what Christians might define as The Holy Spirit, that emotions and an inexplicable (potentially divine) force drives individuals toward believing what they believe in order to better themselves. You begin to see religious leaders not as symbols of divinity but as guide posts to whatever else there is to learn about the human experience with the divine.
In the idea of travel, incongruity, and expansive knowledge lays the integral idea of wilderness. The concept that there is something that is beyond what mankind can teach in words and actions that can only be learned in the fleeting concept of untamed creatures and flora, perhaps even an idea of the communal spirit of a land that allows a better connection with whatever it is divine. However, a pilgrim of this type, while appreciating nature's abilities does not back seat the human and its culture to some chaotic sinful abyss while putting the natural world on a pedestal. This type of pilgrim reveres all facets of learning in order to expand and enhance themselves on three levels, mind, body and soul. And perhaps compare it body to earth mind to the heavens, and the soul to the axis mundi that binds it all. In this a whole person relates to their cosmos as a microcosm in and of to themselves with the borders of each ever expanding and ever changing to include as much of the whole. At this point in my life I feel that whatever that whole may be that it is love, in all its forms, given, received, observed; no matter how far I search I do not believe I'll ever find too much love or too many guises in which it lies.

Amanda DeSalme, reflections on a Gary Snyder excerpt and today's class discussion

from Snyder's The Practice of the Wild:

"The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom. We can enjoy our humanity with its flashy brains and sexual buzz, its social cravings and stubborn tantrums, and take ourselves as no more and no less than another being in the Big Watershed. We can accept each other all as barefoot equals sleeping on the same ground. We can give up hoping to be eternal and quit fighting dirt" (Snyder, 25-26).

I enjoy that Snyder phrases the lesson from the wild to be the "etiquette of freedom." It seems so paradoxical. One definition of the word "etiquette" from Dictionary.com is "conventional requirements as to social behavior." And yet, with the word "freedom," I feel that there is no convention necessary, that people are able to make decisions independent of any expected social behavior. I suppose he is trying to say that the conventions of freedom are exactly that---to be free, and accepting of all beings. We are all "barefoot equals sleeping on the same ground" (Snyder, 26). The whole picture set up in my head is of jovial people letting loose and dancing around outside somewhere in the wildnerness, barefoot, not worrying about dirt or mosquitos but just enjoying life and the company of others. Why can't we always just accept other beings, no matter how different they are?

The discussion in class today about tourism and the staged authenticity reminds me of this acceptance of others. Yes, we try to accept other cultures, and yet we are not really seeing the true culture since we are simply buying modified versions of what they think we want to see. My advice to those trying to truly experience other cultures is to simply go, don't plan things out, just go and see. Skip the touristy bus and touristy markets. Last winter, my family went traveling around some of the Caribbean Islands. My sister and I got absolutely SICK of the commercial glitz and glam that was constantly being flashed in our faces. One day, as we landed on the island of St. Thomas, we decided to experience the island on our own, skipping everything touristy. We explored the island by foot. After a nice long hike, we eventually found a little cove of paradise. It was so silent, away from any tourist-combed beaches filled with things to buy. It was a simple little beach, white sand and clear blue water. Tropical plants and living creatures crawling around. We swam in water so clear we could see the fishes nibbling on our toes, under a vast beautiful sky of warm caribbean sun. There was a family nearby, enjoying the nice day just walking along the beach, and picnicing. We saw a flautist playing into the wind. Eventually the sky clouded up and as we were leaving this haven of beauty, the clouds tore open into a torrential downpour. My sister and I headed towards the side of the island where our boat would be waiting, braving a long walk in the warm tropical rain. A local drove up beside us and offered us a ride. It was incredibly harmless; I know parents teach us not to talk to strangers, but this lady had every good intention. She showed us around the island in her car, telling us about her day and asking us about ourselves. She dropped us off near a marketplace when the sun came out and the torrential rain stopped. My sister and I walked some more and found a delicious little vegan restaurant, where we sat and ate a satisfying meal prepared by wonderful loving people while talking to the flautist we saw on the small beach (who just so happened to be in this restaurant.) We spent almost the whole time talking about jazz and music, because he was a jazz flautist. This excited my sister and I because she plays flute and I am studying jazz, and we both love music in general. Anyways, my point of this whole story is that we had the most amazing experience just going by foot and spontaneous whim, conversing with people and having a true cultural exchange simply by accepting each other as human beings sharing this world with us, rather than as beings who are selling or buying something commercial. As Buber would put it, we had I-you relations with the locals we came across rather than I-it relations.
If you want to experience the world for what it really is, you must accept everyone as your "barefoot equal." You just might discover that you have a surprising amount in common with a vast assortment of people.

Megan Nisbet-Synder: Good, Wild, Sacred

April 8, 2008

Our discussion on April 1, 2008 made me think a lot about humans and the way we treat other humans and animals. The discussion was about our reading of Gary Snyder’s chapter called Good, Wild, Sacred, which is about how disrespectful we are to nature and animals. We use them as a means to our end, instead of an end in themselves. We use nature and animals for what we think is good for us, but what about what is good for them? We have gone too far with our ventures, and we are taking everything for granted. What if they go away and don’t come back one day? Where will we be then?
I thought about this discussion, and I realized that this treatment towards animals and nature is also analogous to how humans treat other humans. When we want something bad, we don’t worry about someone else feelings, or what they want—we want the thing now, and will ignore others or step over others to get it. This is especially true on Black Friday when parents wake up at 3:30 in the morning to go to the store and stand in line for hours to get the latest toy for their children for Christmas. This isn’t the problem, but the problem is the things that sometimes result from these lines. Fights break out, sometimes physical, and the police must sometimes come to break it up. People attempt to bribe others, or pay hundreds just to make sure they get the toy. This happens because people just see others as a means to their end. They want the toy for their children, and they don’t see the people around them as people, but as things in the way of what they want. They don’t realize that they all have the same goal—to make their children happy—they just want to get the toy. This is cliché, but they all need to stop and look around, and realize we’re all people who deserved to be treated like people.
While I have never been a part of these crazy Black Friday parents (and have actually avoided ever shopping on Black Friday), I personally witnessed this kind of behavior the other day when I went to McDonalds to eat. A man was throwing a fit about his order being wrong, and though the woman in the back was already re-making his food, he kept going with his attention rant and ended up degrading her personally by saying that he wouldn’t be here yelling at her if she had gone to college and gotten an education. This made me so angry! Who was he to judge this woman whom he had never met and knew nothing about? It is a perfect example of how badly humans treat other humans—simply as a means to their end. He was hungry, and she was just the thing making his food. He completely ignored the fact that she is a person with feelings, just like himself, and, despite her small mistake, he wouldn’t be eating anything if it weren’t for her. So take a step back from the world for a second, and think about all the people you encounter in a day and how you treat them. Not so good sometimes, huh? Learn to appreciate them as a You, instead of an It (Martin Buber).