Photo by John Suiter, from his book Poets on the Peaks
Gary Snyder turns 90 this week. As a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Zen teacher and scholar, and one of the most original environmental thinkers of the last century, no one has influenced me more than this man. Gary still lives on his own in the homestead he built fifty years ago in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas outside of Nevada City, CA. He is still writing, and still pushing the edges of contemporary thought. Perhaps more than anyone I’ve ever met, Gary lives and embodies what he writes about. Who he is, and the territory he has spent a lifetime exploring at the interface of Buddhist practice and Deep Ecology, is interwoven in the life he has lived to a remarkable degree.
It is easy for me to keep track of Gary’s age, because I am almost exactly twenty years younger. I am part of the counter culture generation that Gary helped to launch. I was in my mid-thirties when I finally met him, a young man living and working as a commercial fisherman in Petersburg, Alaska. I was early in my own Zen practice then, trying to find my way to the scattered pockets of Zen in North America that Gary’s poetry and writings had helped set in motion. It was a lonely path to take in that tiny fishing village nestled into the Tongass National Forest of Southeast Alaska. Gary walked into my life during a tour he was making of rural Alaskan villages in 1984. I got to show him around one of the most vibrant fishing cultures left on the West Coast. The encouragement that he offered me in my Zen practice in the years that followed were an amazing gift. Every year while I lived in Alaska I would make the pilgrimage to Gary’s home, and to sit Zen retreats at the Ring of Bone Zendo that he built with friends on his remote land. My decision to start Inside Passages in 1994, the wilderness mediation retreats that I have led in Southeast Alaska ever since, was a direct outgrowth of Gary’s mentorship.
In 2000, Gary joined me as co-host of a week-long retreat for environmental leaders aboard Catalyst, a classic wood vessel that carried us through the heart of the Tongass region in Southeast Alaska. Every morning we would gather on the stern of Catalyst for a half hour of silent meditation, followed by Gary’s talks on the Heart Sutra, opening vistas into a deep ecological consciousness that our meditations also helped to fuel. Each afternoon we launched kayaks to explore more intimately the treasures of Frederick Sound - the Baird Glacier, Admiralty Island, Ford’s Terror, Endicott Arm - places these folks had spent a lifetime working to protect.
In its journey through the paradoxes of human life, the Heart Sutra proclaims: “No old age and death, and also no extinction of it.” How to open the mind and heart wide enough to receive the truth of such a paradox. I was fifty when we took that trip on Catalyst in 2000, and Gary was seventy. Now I am seventy, and he is ninety. In the blink of an eye, two more decades have passed. Another blink of the eye, if I make it that far, and I will be ninety. We all grow old and die, and yet something in our deepest core remains ageless and deathless.
The art of living youthfully within an aging body is something that Gary has also modeled for me, and for all whose lives he touches. Arguably his best work has emerged in the last twenty years. He has continued to push out the boundaries on our understanding of the world’s unquenchable wildness. As we drift deeper into the pitfalls of our collective human folly, Gary Snyder continues to invite us back to an awareness of the “Big Flow”, of a much longer sense of time’s lineage. As a way of honoring the past, he says, ‘don’t forget the Old Ways’. In envisioning what the future might hold, he argues for developing a “10,000 Year Plan.” And what animates that deeper awareness of past and future is the center point in time where life is actually happening, and which holds the only real creative potential - the present moment itself. At 90, Gary still draws his fire from the simple fruits of the moment at hand, anchored within a lifelong practice of place. During this Covid 19 pandemic, with so many of our cultural habits and assumptions falling down around us, Gary is as well equipped to weather the storm as anyone I know. A life of true reciprocity and respect for the wild systems that sustain us has never made more sense.
I heard an interview with Snyder recently where he was asked what advice or wisdom he could offer about getting old. He laughed, then gave an answer worthy of seventy years of Zen practice. He said, “Enjoy it while you can.”