Poetry Monday: A Little Song for Gaia

As the cricket's soft autumn hum

              is to us,

     so are we to the trees

            as are they

    to the rocks and the hills.

 --Gary Snyder

As a special feature on the DVD of The Practice of the Wild, the short biographical film about Gary Snyder, the poet reads and talks about some poems, including this one, which is part of the Little Songs for Gaia sequence.  He reads it here as a stand-alone.  (It's also used in the film itself, as a voiceover.)  He says that it was inspired by a conversation with his close friend and fellow poet Lew Welch, when they were both quietly looking at the landscape, probably in northern California. Welch wondered what the mountains thought about the trees.  What do you mean? Snyder asked.  To the mountains, Welch guessed, the trees are just passing through.

Snyder's poem focuses on the perspective of time in natural relations, and its effect on perceptions.  But implicit is Welch's sense of everything being alive.  "It is possible to speak of a mountain knowing," Paul Shepard writes in Man in the Landscape, "or, with Jacquetta Hawkes in A Land, of the quiet sentience of rocks."  There is a scientific sense, a good deal more accepted now than when Shepard wrote this in the 1960s, that the web of relationships and behavior of ecosystems like forests and ponds include communication and response to what's going on in the near environment.  Ancient cultures of course accept that rocks and trees have spirits, that they are aware of humans, and humans must treat them with respect and honor.

This DVD also includes an additional interview with Snyder that begins with him talking about the virtue of ahimsa, which is the first precept of Buddhism, and is also central to Hindus and Janism in India.  Snyder translates it as meaning "do as little harm as possible, according to the situation."  So strictly speaking it is not always non-violence.  But what is most important to Snyder is that it applies to everything-- not just to certain humans or even humans in general, but to all beings, including the rocks.

As a boy growing up in the country, young Gary Snyder had a feeling for animals as fellow beings.  But he never lost it, and his conviction that non-human life is just as important led him to study Chinese paintings and then the language, the Japanese language and then Buddhist practice in a monastery in Japan for years.  Even earlier it led him to the last American Indian cultures in his native Northwest.  

We don't know the minds of other beings.  We just don't.  But we know that the degree of consciousness that humans have allows moral thinking and moral decisions.  So this is our duty to the common landscape, the common universe.  This is our part.  In the end we are what we are committed to, even as we fall short.