Gary Snyder

I first was introduced to Gary Snyder’s writings in high school, drawn into his writings particularly of where I grew up, the Bay Area, of Marin and Mt. Tamalpais. To me, he is equal parts West Coast naturalist, Asia-phile and Buddhist. The first two parts I connected with immediately, nature I revere, and Japan was where I was bound to spend some years, maybe drawn to adventure and some kind of exoticism, two motivations for travel that I could pan, but turn out to be effective inroads, leap off points to understanding. The buddhism eluded me, or I eluded it, with a strong cynicism towards all religions having grown up in Marin in the early seventies in all its new age glory. I didn’t let myself look at the zen buddhism until my early 50s. Now I see how unified these elements he writes of are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Snyder

While I love his poetry, Gary Snyder’s great series of essays in “The Practice of the Wild” lays it all out and has been his most profound work for me.

Eihei Dogen

It’s amazing to read and resonate with works written by someone who lived and wrote almost a thousand years ago. I actually understand very little, but his words are playful and deep. His writings, the translations, and various commentaries point to his deep insight into humanity and what Gary Snyder calls a proto-environmentalism. The two writers go hand in hand for me now. They both traveled widely to gain understanding and stayed very much in place as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dōgen

The volume and density of his writing is intimidating. One of my simple and very understandable favorites is “How to Cook Your Life”, on Dogen’s classic “Instructions for the Zen Cook” with commentary by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi. Most profound for me has been “The Mountains and Waters Sutra”: a Practitioners Guide to Dogen’s “Sansuikyo” with commentary by Shohaku Okumura.

Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia/Grateful Dead

Latter day inheritors of beatnik Zen, participants in the explosion of awareness and creativity and connection that came together in the San Francisco Bay Area and has resonated into our culture since the 1960s. In their lives, lyrics and music, the Grateful Dead embraced and explored change with a sort of compulsive and reckless energy, and it was fun. Corralling the literary environment and LSD testing at Stanford, Palo Alto in the early 60s, an environment forgiving enough to allow lives to be unruled by money, the sexual revolution and birth control, reverberations of war in the far east and deeper reverberations of California’s own violent history, a fertile new ground for Zen and the magical environment that is Northern California, the moody fog and dramatic valleys of the coastal mountains, the San Andreas fault…this is the terroire of their music, it comes from and goes back into this all.