On Earth Celebrations and Riprap through Time, Conflict and Power, Friendship and Social Relations, Movement Differences and Social Transformations, a book reading by Gary Snyder
We got up early and to make our way to the 6th Street Community Center at 638 E 6th
in the East Village for the Earth Celebrations-Ecological and Social Change Pression for Climate Solutions through the beloved community gardens of the Lower East Side of New York. One part pageant, another a movement, another a story of our time on this planet; with our lives ever transforming, the process is always different, always the same, always unique. Caroline and I became engaged after the winter pagent in the winter of 2000. Over the years to come, our kids would join the pageant, the first two decades ago. Our second teenager joined the parade in 2022 and 2024. The teenager and I would be puppets, instead of carrying banners as we had past years, they, a puppet for the roof gardens. I would be a spirit of the East River Park resiliency.
Mine would cover me from head to two, shape shifting, transforming, like our lives. Doing so, joining, dozens of earth spirits and puppets, apparitions of gardens, and rivers, swamps, compost, gaia, poets, souls of garden battles past and future. Brad Will and Elizabeth Meixell were here in different, less earthly form. They’d welcomed me here a quarter century prior. We’d celebrate compost becoming part of the earth, ever regenerating, dancers emerging from the celebration, from the depths.
Each year, it changed. And remained the same.
Leaving Sixth Street Community Center, we march through the East Village to East Side Outside Community Garden 415 E 11th St. Inside a young poet Nathan Dufor Ogelbury was telling a story about deep ecology, as a more inclusive view of the environment. It invites a relational sense of things, he tells us. Father / mother, rebirth, our friends and family join us, one march at a time, each march a panorama. In this way we are all an ecological city, ever entwined here, he continues. We can only save ourselves if we save others and this city, says Nathan, if we make others safe, secure, connected with each other,
Its better to know what freedom is than what it isn’t, says the teenager, walking past Compos Garden, Steve Dalachinsky’s poems on sustainability filling the air.
“I was born of nothing, came from nothing, and remain nothing.”
Sweet nothing. To be small.
“Well, normally I'm against big things,” said Pete Seegar, who always supported community gardens and the garden pageants, the smaller, the better. “I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big.”
We keep walking, greeting, chatting with the other puppets. Its still something affirmative, to walk as a puppet, hearing poems fill the air, smelling the compost of the ecological city, thinking of Steve’s spirit, creating something in the eternal cosmic battle between Gaia and the Machine.
Its a clash that chased the teenager’s sister from the garden years and years ago.
Last time I saw Steven Said, he was singing for Ukraine. This year, he was sang, “Song of the Earth Healing” at El Jardin Paraiso.
Healing vs war,
Gaia vs the machine,
Interdependence vs self interest,
the clash duels through time.
My mind trails back to a demonstration a quarter century prior.
Our carnival is their disorderly conduct, said our legal observer Simon as the police surrounded us, outside St Marks Place and Second. Our action aimed at transforming the East Village to a place where use was favored over exchange, community gardens favored over condominiums. In a city driven by a neoliberal urbanism, the action highlighted an age old clash.
It was not uncommon. After all, dialectical clashes are everywhere, as are disagreements over power. Battling climate change, we inevitably find ourselves in conflicts over definitions of problems and what we can do about them. How do we create a better world, ask activists. Doing so, one encounters opinions about science and social change, power and policy. Some offer market solutions; others point out that our means of production fuels the problem. In the midst of it all, the clashes invite us into conversations about friendship and power, community practice and climate change, modes of sustainability and degrowth politics. We wonder, is there room for transformation?
Each garden we visit reminds me of another set of stories, of people and trees, oceans and folly, stories of humans and vanity, sailor and pirates, Melville and Hawthorne, East River Park and poems for trees, fighting chainsaws. They remind us we are all fragile. What of toxic water and development schemes, we see down the street. I want a better catastrophe, says Andrew Boyd, better ways of dealing with each other, better ways of dealing with the problem. So do I.
We keep walking with parade, dropping off the puppets, when they get too heavy, greeting Jerry at Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, and Tequilla, and Constanza, and Damian, our city of friends ever evolving, some disappearing, old hero’s reappearing.
All week, we walk through the city.
Quintessential New York evening after evening, theater, art, music, repeat. Tuesday, watching Stax Soulville USA, meeting their iconic publicist Al Bell, who helped this music find an audience, and musician and Stax songwriter; Booker T. Jones, Booker T. & The M.G.’s...who shared the story of the jam session that became one of their most iconic riffs, Green Onion. We congratulated the executive producer
@tallcaroline73 for yet another masterwork, the word, merging music making storires of social change, of peace and nonviolence. We walk home as the Knicks reclaimed their lead against the Pacers..
And meet friends after the Crocodiles lair, chatting into the evening. End of classes nyc abundance with mona lisa, drinks with mon amour, jamie and jc at stickett in, spring in motion...
Thursday, I zoom in to catch Gary Snyder, still alive, the last Howl reading witness, the living inspiration for Jaffe in the Dharma Bums, still alive over a half cenuture after its author shuffled off, still writing and meditating, and appearing like a friendly apparition on my zoom feed, at the California Book Club, reading:
'Milton by Firelight' a poem of West and East, dialogue with Paradise Lost by John Milton, and the world of the current Sierra. “Take a look at the rocks,” says Gary Snyder. “I learned about horses and older people and cooking over a tin cup, the kind of thing that our grandparents knew that are not imagined today… Domestic cats have a lot to tell you as I found out steadily.”
Actor, narrator, and Zen Buddhist priest, Peter Coyote situates Snyder’s work. He says the impermanence is where our freedom remains. “I was born in 1941.. And a lot of my relatives and friends were communists and socialists. And I watched the McCarthy period swathing through my community, grownups crying in my living room. And I had a lot of anger. By the time I was 12, I started reading the Beats. And they were the first grownups that gave me an armature, to hang some of my thoughts and ideas around. And they all seemed to be interested in zen and Buddhism. They talked a lot about it. And so I ran into Gary Snyder’s name. Flash forward to California in the 1960… there was something about Gary that I couldn’t quite fathom. I resolved to learn from him. So I started going up to his house in the Sierras and I got an idea of what a secular Zen life could look like and I liked and fifty years later I am an ordained priest and and a transmitted teacher. And because of that I have been handed the unenviable task of describing Buddhism in Gary’s work, which is like talking to humans about oxygen. Buddha discovered that everything in the universe was interconnected. And interdependent. And nothing had a fixed or independent self. If you look at your own being, you can’t tell what color or shape you are…” he explains, pointing out that we are ever shifting and influenced by others, by the environment about us. “And there is a great freedom in that. What it means and what Buddha taught us was that everything is impermanent. And this world is full of affliction, which is the energy that keeps things moving, stirring the pot as Gary once called it. And the impermanence is where our freedom arises. If we had a fixed self, we couldn’t change. And so Buddhist practice is also tied to an ethical system, teaching us how to live in this interdependent world, in a kind, generous, nonstingy way, how to model our lives after the life of a Buddha. And we do that by meditating and going deep, and going deeply into the mind, beyond the perimeters of the self, to get some sense, some intuition, of the vastness of the world out there. And by repeated practice, we begin to dwell more and more in that mind. You learn a couple of things, which is what I always get from Gary’s poems, one is that if we disregard the ego for a minute, what our nature is is the nature of the universe, its a vast energy that is constantly extruding itself, as the multiple forms of the world. I think about standing on a cliff and looking at an ocean, full of peaked little waves rising and falling. And each of those waves could stand for a named thing in the universe and they come out of the formlessness of the ocean. And when they have a shape, we call them living, when they go back, we call them dead, but what those little waves forget. And what we forget is that they’ve never for an instant not been a part of the ocean. They are our life. Our live is inextricable from those things. And so to live in the world as we live with the vagaries of the self, and our envies and aggressions, all of that stuff, to begin to live in the world, as one interdependent organism, requires a lot of practice. And sortov the first step of it is to admit that you’re not one of the good guys, that nature itself is half negative and half positive. And that you’re human nature will encompass the potential to become any human act. You can become Buddha, you can be Hitler, you can become Mother Theresa, you can become Jesus or Donald Trump. And if you don’t know that, you are actually very dangerous. You wind up dropping bombs on hotels in Baghdad in the middle of the night because your leader doesn’t like their leader. So one of the reasons we meditate and one of the reasons we practice mindfulness is so that that shadow sides of our nature do not get past our teeth. And don’t excite our muscles. We call it a practice because we fumble over and over again.” We can meditate to learn about ourselves. “Anyway, Gary’s work is to imbued with those values, that I actually can’t extricate them. He’s lived a life. He lived nine years in a Buddhist monastery. He’s lived a life of continuing this examination, pushing past the egoic boundaries, looking at the relationships between animal species, terrain, people, and politics. And a couple of the contributions that he made, I think might be even more important than his poetry. As an artist that was my first contact with him. And that's one i continue to revere. One of the things I continue to learn from Gary was that for many many centuries, Buddhism existed under the permission of the king, or the emperor, or the Shogun. As such, it always has political compromises to make. It really did not think about or push all the implications of freedom when it came to ideas and concepts that might upset the emperor. And here we are in the West and we have this golden opportunity. For the first time, we can look at Buddhism within the whole political context. We can look at our politics through this prism, of kindness, of generosity, of interdependence. What does it mean as an American to stand by and watch as other Americans are deprived of their constitutional rights? And don’t step forward on their behalf? And of their government that their citizenship should guarantee them equal protection. So these are the things that Gary and Robert Akin with his engaged Buddhism began to take on in the West. These are the particular paths that excited me. They seemed consistent with the ethics of kindness and inclusion. If we remember that Buddha was the first to bring women into the practice… He didn’t recognize cast and status. And so I think as Buddhists, we are responsible to mimic that model. The path is where we model of life of the Buddha… We look at our inner nature. As we do that we hope to develop a model of a dignified life which is helpful to other people. And that is what Gary has done in his life. And the constant inclusion of overwriting contradictions. I had to laugh. The minor is not separate from the love of the wilderness; cutting the trail is not separate from the love of the wilderness. Drinking whisky is not separate from being a Buddhist. The Dali Lama has now been prescribed meat in his diet for his health. So we live in a boundaryless world. And what organizes our activity has to be intuitions. And plunging into our inner depths. And remembering that everything has an equal standing. I may not like the fact that I am made up of the same stuff as Donald Trump. But he has equal standing to exist. And my task is to figure our some way to either protect the weak or understand what circumstances and uprisings he has had. Maybe if my father was a Klan guy I might be like Donald Trump. But we’re both indelibly human. We both have a human role to play. And I trust Buddhism as a reliable map to discover it. And I think that's enough.
Gary laughs.
Impermanence is where our freedom lives.
Do you still meditate Gary?
If so, how has it changed?
It hasn’t changed much, says the poet. I learned a lot on the trail.
Nothing gets in the way.
One of the panelists reads Riprap by Gary Snyder
“Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time….
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder, “Riprap” from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. Copyright © 2003 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers.
Source: No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992)
Syder’s is a poetics of kinship, interconnection, dialogues of zen.
Define yourself as inseparable from others, says Robert Haas, commenting on his work, a gate opening to discover something unknown, the ocean in the brain, the brain in nature, moving away form notions of nature as other. The ones who know the most about trees are often those who chop down trees. They know how they work. Engage with the opposition. Learn from the loggers, says Gary Synder. Its not that you are in the woods, you really are in the woods.
We can translate our life with the forests into something else.
Plan for the next 1000 years, not the next 15 years.
Be affectionate to your tools.
Keep your tools sharp, says Snyder.
California Book Club: Gary SnyderMay 16, 2024 08:00 PM Description
“Gary Snyder’s poems, translations, and essays ‘Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems’ and ‘The Practice of the Wild’ are the California Book Club’s May 2024 selections. CBC host John Freeman will lead a free, hour-long conversation about Gary Snyder’s books with special guests, including an appearance by Snyder. Special guests include Rick Bass, Peter Coyote, Jane Hirshfield, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Jack Shoemaker, Kim Shuck, and Will Hearst. The event will also feature readings of Snyder’s poetry and audience questions. Produced by Alta Journal for streaming on Zoom. The beauty of California and the West remains astonishing, even as human activity transforms the landscape. In 1959, Edward Teller warned officials and oil companies about the potential for climate change devastations, and that same year, poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder published 'Riprap,' the chapbook that would kick off his lifetime of deep and concise ecological writings. The poems juxtapose plainly beautiful impressions of nature with striking intimations of the things that threaten it; this chapbook was later coupled with 'Cold Mountain Poems,' a translation of the Chinese poet Han Shan’s work. Like other Beat writers of the past century, Snyder places no intermediaries between the reader and things themselves; nature is part of us, and we are part of it. An understanding of this porousness between the human and the wild propels Snyder’s 1990 book of nine essays, 'The Practice of the Wild.' It takes us from the West Coast into stories of people’s wilderness practices around the globe. Rather than escape into a sharp-angled estrangement from nature and the wild, Snyder seemingly exhorts us, Why not live in synergy with them?”
After the parade, Felicia sent a note the volunteers for the pageant,
“Warm and heartfelt thanks!”
We did it! Thank you to all the artists, gardeners, partner organizations, schools, interns, volunteers and participants who came together to create, collaborate and cultivate climate solutions action through the arts! We honor your contributions joining with Earth Celebrations to co-create the Ecological City: Procession for Climate Solutions 2024 featuring a spectacular procession of visual art, giant puppets, costumes and 21 site performances of music, dance, theater and poetry throughout the community gardens, neighborhood and East River Park waterfront on the Lower East Side of New York City. A cast of 1,000 collaborated to make this vision of our Ecological City a reality and enact the word we wish to see! For 10 miles and 6 hours, the urban ecological pilgrimage weaved throughout the neighborhood with giant puppets, costumed characters and performances celebrating and bringing to life a myriad of inspiring climate solutions initiatives including: sustainable urban agriculture, bioswales, water harvesting ponds, pollinator gardens, compost, solar micro-grids, art & science education, permeable paths, sustainable community culture, holistic healing & wellness, trees’ air filtration, garden-carbon sequestration, biodiversity as well as green roofs, rooftop bee farms and resilient coastal wetlands. On the waterfront we offered mournful homages to the beloved East River Park and its many trees, habitats and species. Ecological City in its 7th year is a year-round effort of creative collaboration, partnership building and action on climate solutions through the arts. 6 months of planning visioning meetings with engagement of local environmental experts and 3 months of Art & Climate Solutions workshops culminated in the spectacular Ecological City - Procession for Climate Solutions on Saturday May 11th.”
