Rainbow Valley Ecovillage, New Zealand, November 1999

It sounded like a gunshot! From inside the house. From the room just outside my bedroom door. I opened the door slowly and peered into the living room. There was Udaya, kneeling on the couch, holding a shotgun pointing out through the open window.

“What are you shooting at?”

“Possums. They climb into the trees when it gets dark and eat my fruit.”

“Did you hit any?”

“No, but I think I scared them off.”

“You going to do any more shooting tonight?”

“No, that should keep them away for now.”

“OK. I’m going back to sleep.”

 

Late the next morning, I asked Udaya to show me how to get to the giant kauri tree. He took me to the end of the valley on the back of his quad bike. He warned me that the trail had not been maintained for some time, and guessed it would take me about two hours to get to the tree. I set out with my day pack on my back, two liters of water and food inside. It was a warm spring day, sunny, and dry. I walked along the trail at an easy pace for some time. Then there was no trail any more. Just then I spotted the thickening of dry vine forest that Udaya mentioned would signal the spot where I needed to take a sharp right. I could tell I was near the edge of the plateau; there was more sunlight seeping in from above, and a soft breeze picked up ahead of me.

And then there it was. On the very edge of the plateau it stood, a true elder, spared only by its location. There would have been no way to cut it down, and no way to salvage it. It was hugging the 150-meter high cliff. One side of its two- and-a-half-meter diameter base was on level land on the plateau, the other side out in thin air. I couldn’t tell how tall it was, but I could believe it had been alive 1200 years, as Udaya said. I stood there in awe. This was not a tree you could hug. All I could hear was the wind. Sitting down, with my back to the tree, I drank water and devoured my sandwich and apple.

The Coromandel Peninsula was covered in kauri forest when the European colonizers first arrived. One of the largest kauri is the Father of the Forests in Mercury Bay, with a reported girth of twenty meters. Fire destroyed the Father of the Forests. Such is the fate of many fine trees in New Zealand, many fires intentionally set. Most of the kauri forests of the Coromandel were logged and burnt, but fortunately they have been regenerating, and some kauri stands were left untouched.

Udaya had once been a prominent member of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. He left Auckland to establish an ecovillage in this natural 800-acre subtropical paradise. And there he was shooting at possum. Not a very Buddhist thing to do, I suppose. Not that I was surprised by his animosity towards these fruit-loving forest marsupials. Staying at a hostel once, I met a local man who made his living trapping and selling dead possum to the possum fur industry. And hitchhiking to Thames one day, I had a ride with a Maori man who made his living advising the Department of Conservation on the best methods of trapping possum. In New Zealand, the possum is a pest. Still, even now, the memory of Udaya blasting the possums from his living room couch is a vivid image of the absurd.

So there I was, far away from civilization, alone with my new friend. Kauri had been logged here for over a thousand years, and this loner was still very much alive. I stretched out on the ground next to the trunk, closed my eyes and took a deep breath of fresh forest air. I must have dozed off for an hour, or two – I couldn’t tell. Waking up to reality, I peered through the branches to see the sun in the sky. My guess was two hours of daylight left. Collecting my pack, I started hurriedly walking back the way I came. Within a few minutes, though, it was clear to me that I had no idea how to connect with the trail. The look of the dense vine forest, with its giant trees and ferns, is so different coming from the opposite direction; and of course, there is much less light when the sun is low in the sky.

I was lost. And I panicked. Thoughts came quickly. If I could not get out of the forest before sunset, I would have to spend the night here. I wondered if Udaya would come looking for me. Would I be safe in the forest at night? Then I stopped thinking. Sitting down on a mossy, fallen tree, I took a swig of water. And then, slowly, my equilibrium returned. I looked over in the direction I expected to see the beginning of a trail, thinking maybe I could spot a landmark, recognize a broken branch, or vines wrapped around a familiar tree. Astonishingly, almost right away, looking out in front of me about five meters away, there was a clump of forest I had seen before. It looked like the spot where I turned to the right, heading for the kauri. I got up and took a few steps. Then I was sure of it. What a relief! There was the trail straight ahead.

By the time Udaya’s house appeared up ahead, the sun had set and it was almost dark. A feeling both eerie and comforting came over me. Had there been some mysterious energy, some power or force, out in the forest, guiding me to the trail when I was lost?

 

Tararu Valley, New Zealand, December 1999

I met Sarah, from Victoria, at the Tararu Valley Sanctuary and Land Trust. Just eighteen, curious, full of life, and intelligent, Sarah was taking a year off school to be an environment volunteer. Her job was to look after the stoat traps. Stoats are slender-bodied carnivores, part of the mustelids – the weasel family. They were introduced to New Zealand in the late 19^th century to control the rabbit population, itself introduced to New Zealand earlier that century. Rabbits were brought for sportsmen to hunt, for food, and to remind the British colonizers of home.

Stoats eat the kiwi bird eggs and kill the kiwi chicks. Only five percent of kiwi birds that hatch survive, and half the kiwi population is lost each decade. I am not sure why the New Zealanders work so hard to prefer the kiwi over the stoats, but there must be good reasons for this, other than the fact New Zealanders are known around the world as kiwis.

Sarah walked the trails each day, checking the traps. Most days she would take a few golf balls with her. As far as a stoat was concerned, a golf ball was a kiwi egg. Sarah would make sure the trap was well situated to entice a stoat, and had a golf ball inside. There were dozens of these wooden boxes spread throughout the property’s winding trails. Sarah said the worst part of her job was removing the dead stoat, as the smell of a decomposing stoat was beyond tolerance. And she was not totally comfortable being involved in killing animals just out for an easy meal. But, she did say with some nonchalance, any time she would find a dead stoat in the trap, she would simply fling it as far as she could into the dense brush – that was the extent of stoat disposal.

I liked Sarah. One day, we were talking about philosophy and books. I mentioned my love of Zen and Taoism, and she said she was travelling with a copy of the Tao Te Ching, a gift from her mother. That impressed me! Now I liked her mother too. Sarah lent me her copy – the Vintage Books edition, translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. Here is a section I like:

Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?

I don’t think it can be done.

In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.

In the pursuit of the Tao, every day something is dropped.

Less and less is done

Until non-action is achieved.

When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.

The world is ruled by letting things take their course.

It cannot be ruled by interfering.

 

I stayed with the land trust for a month, and then moved two kilometers down the valley road to volunteer with the Buddhist retreat center. Sudarshanaloka, or Land of Beautiful Vision, was a sprawling property, its holding stretching from the river valley in the West, to the mountaintop clearing where the Stupa sat. Buildings on the property were the main house, a row of huts for residents and long-term visitors, a meditation hut, and five retreat cabins spread out in the forest. Members of the order would come from all over the world for silent solitary retreats, lasting anywhere from one month to as long as three years. The small resident community on the property looked after all the needs of the retreatants, delivering food and supplies every Friday.

In January, the river flooded, filling with water from the mountains after three days of non-stop heavy rainfall. The overflowing river made getting out of the center impossible, because the ford on the road was a meter below the water level, and the river ran much too fast and powerful. After waiting anxiously for two days, hoping the water level would drop, Pierrick and Buddhadasa hired a helicopter to airlift them into town so they could catch their flight to Australia for a conference.

That afternoon, while inside the house, I heard loud intermittent banging sounds that sounded like the Gods were playing billiards with boulders. It was still pouring rain. I grabbed an umbrella and walked gingerly down the muddy hill to the river to see for myself. The water was brown. It was carrying whole trees, large branches, boulders, and other debris down to the sea. I stood there stunned, umbrella in hand, sweatpants rolled up to the knee, in a T-shirt, and beach shoes on my feet, standing on a rock by the river. The sound of boulders colliding as they floated past me was something I had never heard before.

A few weeks later, the community decided the possum population on the property was becoming too much of a nuisance. Earlier one evening, we heard a loud “Hey!” from Punyasri in the library, and we went in to find a possum sitting inside the trash can, staring at us, an apple core in its mouth and the look of a child caught with a hand in the cookie jar. It must have crawled in through the open window. We turned out the light and Buddhadasa shood it back out the window. At the community meeting, after much discussion – they normally adhere to the ideal of ahimsa (non-harming) – the decision was taken to scatter anti-possum poison pellets.

About a week later, as I was rising one morning, I was accosted by a stench as awful as I had ever known. When I mentioned this to Guhyaratna, my neighbour, he said it must be a dead possum that had eaten the poison and died in the crawl space under our huts. “It’s going to be a big job finding it and getting it out of there”, he said unhappily, knowing full well it was going to be his job to do. I could not help but have a little silent private chuckle, observing this little war between the humans and these innocents of the forest.

A few days later, walking down for dinner one evening, I spotted Buddhadasa on a ladder, tying two big black plastic bags full of garbage to the joists just outside the rear entrance to the house. Seeing my puzzled expression, he explained: “Garbage pickup isn’t until Wednesday; need to keep this away from the possums.” ‘Good idea’, I thought.

The next morning, after my yoga in the meditation hut, I was eager for some breakfast. On my way into the house, I saw what normally would be good reason for expletives and frustration. But I could barely keep myself from laughing out loud. There was garbage strewn all over the floor. Still attached to the joists above were the torn remnants of two black plastic garbage bags, with packaging material and other waste peaking through big wide open holes. We cleaned it up in just a few minutes. Buddhadasa did not say a word. I thought of an ancient Chinese poem:

Sitting quietly,

Doing nothing

Spring comes.

And the grass grows by itself.

Wild Nature and the Dusty World
Gary Snyder on Dogen’s Mountains and Waters ‘Sutra’

[See the pdf at http://terebess.hu/zen/mesterek/The-Practice-of-the-Wild-by-Gary-Snyder.pdf]

As T. S. Eliot proposed, the end is where we start from. In “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking,” a chapter in his book Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder borrows from Dogen Kigen’s “Mountains and Waters Sutra” a dharma talk from the year 1240. Snyder ends the chapter with:

“Dogen finishes his meditation on mountains and waters with this: ‘When you investigate mountains thoroughly….such mountains and waters of themselves become wise persons and sages’—become sidewalk vendors and noodle-cooks, become marmots, ravens, graylings, carp, rattlesnakes, mosquitoes. All beings are ‘said’ by the mountains and waters—even the clanking tread of a Caterpillar tractor, the gleam of the keys of a clarinet.”

Snyder proposes a change in perception to erase the illusory boundaries the mind establishes between nature and humans and everything else. Snyder’s extension of Dogen’s imagery follows two paths. First, he proposes that mountains and waters – in China and Japan literally “landscape,” and the whole of wild nature – become all beings (human and non-human). This first proposition seems a fair extension of Dogen’s metaphor, but Snyder also proposes that everything in the world (alive and not) comes from wild nature. And since humans come from wild nature, everything that humans create, such as tractors and clarinets, and I presume also pollution, computers, robots, plastic, weapons of mass destruction, and unmanned flying machines, come from wild nature. Even if we accept all living things and everything that exists in the world to be a part of the whole we call nature, it still seems a large leap to conclude that what humans make comes from nature; that wild nature becomes plastic and GMOs and submarines and nuclear warheads.

If I imagine life 750 years ago, I can see how people living then could accept that all that there is comes from wild nature. But I wonder if humans today are manipulating nature and creating man-made non-natural things. Perhaps we need to hold on to some discernible distinctions. And maybe this is something that Snyder had not concerned himself with when he wrote Practice of the Wild (published in 1990).

That said, the clear artistic beauty of Snyder’s essay makes it an engaging read as well as intellectually stimulating. He questions philosophical assumptions prevalent in modern civilization, not by way of argument but by integrating poetry from East and West and then and now; lyrical prose and anecdote; literatures, mythology, and legend. Snyder’s technique is like that of a Zen master giving a dharma talk on the subject of nature. He invokes ancient masters and their storytelling style, spicing it all up with sometimes cryptic language that stirs the rational mind. He knows you can lead the rational mind to the well of insight, but also that rational words alone cannot convince the rational mind to drink from the well.

Snyder takes us on a journey that begins with the notion of travel. In the ancient East, all travel was done by walking. And one could only know the land by walking, by experiencing it with the whole body. And the land was mountains and waters, and the whole of wild nature. And the mountains and waters made humans, and mountains are constantly walking, as humans are constantly walking. “We learn a place on foot and with imagination.” Landscape refers to the “totality of the process of nature… the whole, with its rivers and valleys, obviously includes farms, fields, villages, cities, and the dusty world of human affairs.” The “dusty world” must be left behind if one wants “realization or at least a long healthy life.”

Snyder elevates the notion of “homeless” to mean the person who has left the obligations of the secular world behind, “leaving the world to get away from the imperfections of human behavior, especially urban life. Some of these people live as mountain hermits or members of religious communities.” Snyder refers to fifth century Chinese poet Zhiang-yan, who said the hermit leaves the “house” and should “take the purple heavens to be his hut, the encircling sea to be his pond, roaring with laughter in his nakedness.” And Snyder also invokes Han-shan, an early Japanese poet who wrote his “spacious home reaches to the end of the universe….freely drifting, I prowl the woods and streams and linger watching things themselves.…thin grass does for a mattress, the blue sky makes a good quilt.” For Snyder, “homeless” means “being at home in the whole universe.”

The ancient Chinese and Japanese Taoists and Buddhists saw themselves as part of nature, or at least living in harmony with nature. It was how they were in the world. Dogen said “if you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking.” The language is Zen: cryptic, mysterious, puzzling, paradoxical. Like a Zen koan, Dogen perhaps intends to break the mind’s habitual way of thinking. For Dogen, mountains and streams – wild nature – do not have any special sacred or spiritual quality. Ancient East Asians’ perception of their place in the world was bound up with their life in wild nature, so different from Descartes and Bacon’s philosophy of nature, and also different from Emerson’s reverence for nature. “The idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction; it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness.”

The leap from ancient East Asia hundreds of years ago to today is a leap Snyder makes with his many digressions into literatures, stories, and myths. All peoples rely on their literatures to tell them who they are and how to live. Snyder is perhaps pointing to modern Western society’s neglect of the mythic tradition, unlike the experience of many indigenous peoples. On one page single he uses three different terms to refer to indigenous peoples: “vernacular,” “wilderness,” and “primary,” highlighting modernity’s loss of collective mythic consciousness through neglect.

This brings us closer to Snyder’s main message. The city and all human creations come from wild nature. Dogen’s “mountains and streams are the processes of this Earth, all of existence… they roll being and nonbeing together. They are what we are, we are what they are.” In other words, Snyder invites reconsideration of that habitual attitude of dualistic thinking. “No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways.” And more: “This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.”

This is difficult for a modern Westerner like me to grasp. Even accepting the notion that rational Western perception (ala Descartes) skips over and ignores an important part of reality, to say that “thusness is the nature of the nature of nature… [t]he wild in wild,” does not logically lead to the next statement: “So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove… the blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter.” As if to say: We are the blue mountains; the blue mountains are us. This is what Snyder is pointing to. Puzzling and mysterious.

Snyder sprinkles his essay with anecdotes that tell readers he knows of what he speaks. He tells of attending a ceremony at a shrine on an island in the East China Sea, a ceremony with offerings and ritual. And he notes the parallel with each household: “Photos of ancestors, offerings of rice and alcohol, a vase with a few twigs….the house itself… becomes a little shrine….then the literal house… is just another part of the world… itself impermanent… a poor homeless thing in its own right. Houses are made up of pine boards, clay tiles, cedar battens… – made up of the same world as you and me and mice.”

The aim is to throw doubt on habitual Western dualistic thinking. Quoting Dogen again: ‘Blue mountains are neither sentient nor insentient. At this moment, you cannot doubt the blue mountains walking.’ But can the words of an ancient master from the East impress the Western mind? I wonder if perhaps Dogen was here using language metaphorically to point out a paradox; the way a Zen koan is used as a device to stun the rational mind into a different way of seeing. Either way, the metaphor is all the more pleasing for its ambiguous paradoxical quality.

Snyder extends and extrapolates: “Not only plum blossoms and clouds, or Lecturers and Roshis, but chisels, bent nails, wheelbarrows, and squeaky doors are all teaching the truth of the way things are. The condition of true ‘homelessness’ is the maturity of relying on nothing and responding to whatever turns up on the doorstep. Dogen encourages us with ‘a mountain always practices in every place’.” The aim here is to inspire a new way of looking at the world. But what is this “practice” Dogen speaks of? Is he speaking about practice as living life? Or is he speaking of Zen practice? And is there not a difference between what was possible and encouraged in religious circles in East Asia hundreds of years ago, when Dogen was in the mountains practicing, compared with the “dusty” world of today? “I wonder what Dogen would have said about city walking,” reflects Snyder. For Snyder, Dogen is as relevant today as he was eight centuries before.

Gary Snyder proclaims he has lived all his life “in and around wild nature, working, exploring, studying, even while living in cities.” He claims to not see a boundary between wild nature, humans, and cities. After years of walking and practicing in Japan, he has opened a door to a world of non-dualistic thinking. He has absorbed the ancient East Asian spiritual attitude of “blue mountains constantly walking” – the mountains are humans and the humans are mountains. But, he has taken an extra step, a leap perhaps, with the perception that since humans made the cities from nature and things in nature, that the cities are also mountains! This, then, is the nub of Snyder’s modern Zen extension of Dogen’s ancient metaphor.

For Snyder, science, technology, and the economic uses of nature need not be opposed. “The line between use and misuse… is fine indeed…is in the details.” Snyder tells of being at the dedication of a Japanese temple that had been reassembled on the West Coast of the United States. The dedication had been made with an offering of plants from Japan. But “the ritualists had the forms right but clearly didn’t grasp the substance.” The plants would not thrive in the climate of their new home, and the wood of the temple needed more humid conditions. “People… have elaborate notions of separateness and difference and dozens of ways to declare themselves ‘out of nature.’” This separateness, asserts Snyder, leads to a “call to a special destiny on the part of human beings… and to human [abuse] of the rest of nature [with] “pernicious” results.

Invoking Dogen again: “When dragons and fish see water as a palace, it is just like human beings seeing a palace. They do not think it flows. If an outsider tells them, “what you see as a palace is running water,” the dragons and fish will be astonished, just as we are when we hear the words, “mountains flow.” Now Snyder proposes: “We can…imagine… the nested hierarchies and webs of the actual non-dualistic world.” Snyder borrows from Dogen’s vivid imagistic language:

It is not only that there is water in the world, but there is a world in water. It is not just in water. There is a world of sentient beings in clouds… in the air… in fire… There is a world of sentient beings in a blade of grass.”

What Snyder invites is this fresh shift in perspective: “We can see multitudes of interactions through hundreds of other eyes. We could say a food brings a form into existence. Salmon call for bears… plankton for salmon… salmon call for seals and orcas.” The condition of one being in an ecosystem is an indicator of the condition of the whole ecosystem: “Old conifer forests can be measured by Spotted Owl… The Great Plains would say ‘bison.’ What says humans? What sucks our lineage into form? It is surely the ‘mountains and rivers without end’ – the whole of this earth… [where] we find ourselves more or less competently at home.” This lyrical return to the notion of home brings us back to the notion of “homeless” and elicits nostalgia for a forgotten past when humans lived in harmony with mountains and waters; when they were at home in the whole universe.

And that large leap from wild nature to the “dusty world” now means fording a narrower river. “As for towns and cities – they are old tree trunks, riverbed gravels, oil seeps, landslide scrapes… leavings after floods… rotting logs, watercourses… feeding frenzies… lookout rocks, and ground-squirrel apartments.”

Snyder suggests ancient China sent two great gifts to Japan, and then from there to the rest of the world. The first was landscape painting, calligraphy, and Zen; the second was a vision of a great city. “Both are brimming with energy and life. Because most of the cities of the world are now mired in poverty, overpopulation, and pollution we have all the more reason to recover the dream. To neglect the city (in our hearts and minds for starters) is deadly…”

Perhaps the Gateless Gate, the Classic Book of Zen Koans places another perspective – or a mirror image – on the matter. The verse from case 16 reads:

With realization, all things are of one family,
Without realization, everything is separate and different;
Without realization, all things are of one family,
With realization, everything is separate and different.

This verse describes two different aspects of realization; two different ways of perceiving reality; both merging into one vision. Perceiving absolute sameness is the first. Perceiving absolute difference is the second. This paradox of perception attacks the attack on the illusory boundaries of perception that concern Snyder in “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking.” But here, of course, we are speaking of “realization” perception.

How do we get there from where we are? That is Snyder’s objective. To nudge; to invite like the white waves on a yellow shore under an azure sky made orange by a sinking sun. Perhaps the invitation is for the heart, not the mind.

Red, White, and Green; the warning of Luther Standing Bear            

 

The Lakota way of being in the world provides context to explain why modern Western civilization is destroying the natural world. This flows from Luther Standing Bear’s description of Indian mind and white mind (1). For me, four themes stand out.

First, the theme of individual consciousness – awareness of the world. Indian mind is a way of being in the world that is in harmony with all living things. Standing Bear calls this way of being in “…kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water”. This way of being is closed off permanently for almost all white minds. And since there can be no true understanding between minds operating at different levels of consciousness, white people are not capable of hearing, nor appreciating the import of, Standing Bear’s words.

Second, the theme of scientific thinking. For the Lakota, writes Standing Bear, “…mountains, lakes, rivers, springs, valleys, and woods were all finished beauty; winds, rain, snow, sunshine, day, night, and change of seasons brought interest; birds, insects, and animals filled the world with knowledge that defied the discernment of man… Lakota could despise no creature; all were filled with the essence of the Great Mystery.” For the white man, there is no Great Mystery, only uncharted territory to be discovered, classified, labeled, explained, dissected, analyzed, and used for the benefit of humans. Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese scientist and farmer, known for his practice of natural farming, states quite forcefully in The One-Straw Revolution: “…understanding nature is beyond the intelligence of man”. (2)

Third, the theme of thinking with the heart. Luther Standing Bear writes “…I have come to know the white mind does not feel toward nature as does the Indian mind.” There is one word choice that allows us to glean a valuable insight from this sentence. Standing Bear does not say the white mind does not think as the Indian mind. He says the white mind does not feel toward nature as does the Indian mind. A similar notion is recounted by Carl Jung, the founder of depth psychology. In 1925, at the age of 50, Jung visited the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. According to Jung, Ochwiay Biano, the chief, shared that his Pueblo people felt whites were “mad,” “uneasy and restless,” always wanting something. Jung inquired further about why he thought they were mad. The chief replied that white people say they think with their heads – a sign of illness in his tribe. “Why of course,” said Jung, “what do you think with?” Ochwiay Biano indicated his heart. (3)

Fourth, the theme of sensitive, somatic awareness. The Indian lives with respect for the source of his food, water, and air. These are essential for survival. Kinship with all living things comes from sensing with the body – touching, smelling, tasting, listening, and most of all seeing with natural eyes. The white mind has lost this sensitivity by supplying food, water, air, and all of nature as commodities. All a white person needs for survival is money. There is no need to understand or appreciate the source of the food, water, and air. Food, water, even air, can all be purchased with money. As a result of this alienation from nature, White mind has skin and hands but does not know how to touch, has ears but does not know how to listen, has a nose but does not know how to smell, has eyes but cannot see clearly. As Emerson has written, “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature.” (4)

Indian mind, as Luther Standing Bear tells us, is a kind of consciousness, able to see what is there, with fresh open eyes. Indeed, many white people have experienced an alteration of their consciousness, arriving at a state of mind resembling more closely that of the Indian mind. Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau come to mind. My sense is that such transformations of consciousness occur only for individuals immersed intensely inside a natural world, or in circumstances of great pain or trauma. There are other catalysts, I am sure, but my point is that it happens infrequently. It is doubtful whether this consciousness can be accessed by the will, desire, or intention of a white mind. And if this is the case, it is possible, then, that expository nature writing will be read only by lovers of nature and lovers of nature writing.

There is one strand of nature writing that may help to transform white minds without the need for extraordinary catalysts. Standing Bear’s description of the Lakota way of being in the world is made personal and enhanced by his boyhood memories. He knows of what he speaks from personal experience and observation, and that is what he describes for us. “The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with the feeling of being close to a mothering power.” There is a hint in his expository prose that suggests storytelling may perhaps engage the white mind and heart on a deeper level of knowing. This is especially so, I think, when storytelling is written in language accessible to young people. As Standing Bear writes, “…the old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things, soon led to lack of respect for humans too. So he kept his youth close to its softening influence.” Young people can be brought close to nature’s softening influence by encouraging them to be in nature, and also by providing storytelling in accessible prose and style. I am thinking of three particular examples:

• The Education of Little Tree, by Forrest Carter
• I heard the owl call my name, by Margaret Craven, and
• Pilgrims of the Wild, by Grey Owl (Archibald Belaney)

 

Notably, each of these books has been adapted into film, or has inspired a film.

 

Endnotes

1. Standing Bear, Luther. “Nature”. Nature Writing: The Tradition in English. Eds. Finch, Robert, and John Elder. New York: Norton, 2002. 326-331.

2. Fukuoka, Masanobu. The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming. Trans. Larry Korn. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1978

3. Shulman Lorenz, Helene and Mary Watkins. “Depth Psychology and Colonialism: Individuation, Seeing Through, and Liberation.” 4 Sep. 2000. 25 Oct 2009 <http://www.pacifica.edu/gems/creatingcommunityw/depthpsychologycolonialism.pdf>

4. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature”. Nature Writing: The Tradition in English. Eds. Finch, Robert, and John Elder. New York: Norton, 2002. 140-151 (p. 143)