Noah Ryan, Three by Annie Dillard

Work is of great importance in our lives. Our work-obsessed culture has us working 40+ hours a week for our entire lives. Even people who do not "work" in the sense of having a job still has to make a living somehow. This could mean farming, hunting, gathering, or some of each. The relationship of a person to their way of making a living is vitally important in one's life. Writing transforms Dillard into a writer, painting turns one into a painter. If one's work is dull and unsatisfying it is a great dullness and emptiness in one's life. The opposite of this would be something profoundly fulfilling that doesn't occupy one's life, but rather consumes it. It seems that this would be a sort of I-You relationship with making a living. If, for example, working is done in a ritual context, say some sort of sacred hunt, then it is engaging the person the landscape and the animal in a way that can be very meaningful for the person (and the landscape and animal too, if we step outside of the western mindset and allow them to have agency in this affair). The point I'm trying to make here is that while some may find an subject that interests them, and they may spend their lives doing that thing, many people do not have that opportunity. If we are shaped by our jobs, in the sense that the relationship between the I and the You or It is reciprocal and shapes us, then the vast majority of jobs available are not ones that tend to create full and mature people.
I for one am excited to find out what programming makes me (I'll bet its a programmer), but I'm also wary of the structure of our jobs and the void that they may bring.

Amanda DeSalme, Night

There is something magical about a nice cool summer night. I feel invigorated and my senses are overcome with stimulation- the smell of fresh cut grass, the caress of the moist air, the gentle breeze, the crescendo of an orchestra of cicadas, the mysterious moon or the sparkling stars in the vast void of dark nothingness. It is so energizing to be outside and just enjoying life at night. I remember spending time marvelling at the nighttime with my father and sister when I was a child. It was so quiet with small night music and things to look at and talk about. We would tiptoe barefoot out into the grass timidly, eyes slowly adjusting to the dim moonlight. Sometimes we would walk around the neighborhood and sometimes we would throw a blanket on the ground so we could ly and watch the sky. We would talk in hushed whispers, sensing the sacredness of the mysterious wild nature that comes to life at night. There is so much life around us that we are not aware of. For instance, Cicadas spend 13-17 years underground as nymphs before they dig their way up into the air and start serenading us with their music. Annie Dillard talks about cicadas in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

"In the dark of an April night the nymphs emerge, all at once, as many as eighty-four of them digging into the air from every square foot of ground. They inch up trees and bushes, shed their skins, and begin that hollow, shrill grind that lasts all summer. I guess nymphs never see the sun. Adults lay eggs in slits along twig bark; the hatched nymphs drop to the ground and burrow, vanish from the face of the earth, biding their time, for thirteen years. How many are under me now, wishing what? What would I think about for thirteen years? They curl, crawl, clutch at roots and suck, suck blinded, suck trees, rain or shine, heat or frost, year after groping year" (Dillard, 97).

Cicadas and many other creatures are constantly crawling around underneathe our feet every day and we are not aware. When I enjoyed the nighttime with my father and sister, I would often sit there and wonder about all the animals that were in the dark, watching us. I would hear a rustle of a bush and wonder if it was wind or creature or both. There are so many lives out there we can commune with. I guess what I like so much about the nighttime is that it makes me aware. It is harder to see, therefore I am more aware that there is mystery to be aware of. And the more aware I am, the more in the present I am. And being in the present just feels good.

Amanda DeSalme, Snyder and Sacrificial Existence

from Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild:

"When they arrive their 'armor is broken'- they are killed- enabling them to shake off their fur or scale coats and step out as invisible spirit beings. They are then delighted by witnessing the human entertainments- sake and music. (They love music.) The people sing songs to them and eat their flesh" (Snyder, 93-94).

In this passage Snyder talks of how the original inhabits of Japan, the Ainu, would sing to the fish or game and say grace for them. The people showed great respect for the sacrifice of other lives that made it possible for them to live. The world today is so far removed from the process of killing animals for food that many do not appreciate the sacrifice and the spiritual exchange involved in it. Every food we need for existence is readily available in a grocery store. For the natives of Japan and other countries, the food they collected (whether plant or animal) was given much respect, understanding that they were partaking of a life that had a spirit, and that was something to be honored. Today, the meat industry is completely inhumane in their treatment of the animals. We have domesticated them and bred them in masses and placed them in tiny cages with the sole purpose in life to be food for humans. Snyder alludes to this modern flaw as well: "But weeding out the wild from the natures of members...gradually changed animals which are intelligent and alert in the wild to sluggish meat-making machines" (Snyder, 85). This is one reason why I personally have chosen to be a vegetarian. I'm not going to get on a soapbox about it, but I do believe that any living being does not deserve to be processed and exploited like we have done to various animals in the meat industry. I respect others who do choose to eat meat, but they gain my full respect if they truly understand the sacrifice of life in the flesh that they are eating and the spiritual exchange that should happen between wild animal and human. The natives believed that if humans maintained their proper hospitality towards the animals, music and manners, the spirits of the beings would be reborn over and over again. This is an example of one of the many cycles that exist in nature. Plants sacrifice their lives to animals which sacrifice their lives to humans whose bodies decompose in the ground to fertilize new plant growth. It is a constant cycle of sacrificial existence and every natural thing is connected in it.

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?