The Practice of the Wild Snyder:

The Words Nature, Wild, and Wilderness

Take nature first. The word nature is from Latin natura, "birth, con-

stitution, character, course of things"—ultimately from nasci, to be

born. So we have nation, natal, native, pregnant. The probable Indo-

European root (via Greek gna—hence cognate, agnate) is gen (San-

skrit jan), which provides generate and genus, as well as kin and kind

The word wild is like a gray fox trotting off through the forest, duck-

ing behind bushes, going in and out of sight. Up close, first glance,

it is "wild"—then farther into the woods next glance it's "wyld" and

it recedes via Old Norse villr and Old Teutonic wilthijaz into a faint

pre-Teutonicghweltijos which means, still, wild and maybe wooded

(wald) and lurks back there with possible connections to will, to

Latin silva (forest, sauvage), and to the Indo-European root ghwer,

base of Latin fetus (feral, fierce), which swings us around to Tho-

reau's "awful ferity" shared by virtuous people and lovers.

…

Most of the senses in this second set of definitions come very close

to being how the Chinese define the term Dao, the way of Great

Nature: eluding analysis, beyond categories, self-organizing, self-

informing, playful, surprising, impermanent, insubstantial, inde-

pendent, complete, orderly, unmediated, freely manifesting, self-

authenticating, self-willed, complex, quite simple. Both empty

and real at the same time. In some cases we might call it sacred. It is

not far from the Buddhist term Dharma with its original senses of

forming and firming

T H E E T I Q U E T T E OF FREEDOM · 11

The word wilderness, earlier wyldernesse, Old English wildeornes, pos-

sibly from "wild-deer-ness" (deor, deer and other forest animals) but

more likely "wildern-ness," has the meanings…

A place of abundance, as in John Milton, "a wildernesse of

sweets."

Milton's usage of wilderness catches the very real condition of en-

ergy and richness that is so often found in wild systems. "A wilder-

nesse of sweets" is like the billions of herring or mackerel babies in

the ocean, the cubic miles of krill, wild prairie grass seed (leading

to the bread of this day, made from the germs of grasses)—all the

incredible fecundity of small animals and plants, feeding the web.

But from another side, wilderness has implied chaos, eros, the un-

known, realms of taboo, the habitat of both the ecstatic and the de-

monic. In both senses it is a place of archetypal power, teaching, and

challenge.

“I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like 'Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha,' then I run on, say to 'David O. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha' though I don't use names like David O. Selznick, just people I know because when I say the words 'equally a coming Buddha' I want to be thinking of their eyes, like you take Morley, his blue eyes behind those glasses, when you think 'equally a coming Buddha' you think of those eyes and you really do suddenly see the true secret serenity and the truth of his coming Buddhahood. Then you think of your enemy's eyes.”

― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

Gary snyder https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/09/10/the-nature-of-gary-snyder/

When Snyder returned from Japan, his early books of poems—Riprap, Myths and Texts, The Back Country—had appeared. Hard to convey—except that it is still available—the freshness and originality of his vision. The most striking voices in North American poetry in the fifties and early sixties—post-Hiroshima, post-Auschwitz, what W. H. Auden called “the age of anxiety”—wrote a poetry of psychological crisis: the ferocious poems of Sylvia Plath, the struggles of Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke with bipolar disorder and of John Berryman with alcoholism and depression, and Allen Ginsberg’s hyperbolic address to a generation “destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” There was a slight shock turning from that work to Snyder’s evocation of the sheer energy of the living world:

Birds in a whirl, drift to the rooftops
Kite dip, swing to the seabank fogroll
Form: dots in air changing line from line,
………the future defined.
Brush back smoke from the eyes,
………dust from the mind,
With the wing-feather fan of an eagle.
A hawk drifts into the far sky.
A marmot whistles across huge rocks.
Rain on the California hills.
Mussels clamp to sea-boulders
Sucking the Spring tides

Birds in a whirl, drift to the rooftops

Kite dip, swing to the seabank fogroll

Form: dots in air changing line from line,

………the future defined.

Brush back smoke from the eyes,

………dust from the mind,

With the wing-feather fan of an eagle.

A hawk drifts into the far sky.

A marmot whistles across huge rocks.

Rain on the California hills.

Mussels clamp to sea-boulders

Sucking the Spring tides