Lindsey Pritchett - Gary Snyder's poetry: nature

Today in class we discussed how Gary's poetry often refers to "the muse." We talked about how Gary identifies "the muse" as nature itself, or the great goddess. Nature is an abstract concept as no two people define it in the same way. Someone refers to nature as the wilderness while another identifies it as our baser instincts. There is a mistaken belief that nature is less than authentic. In reality, nature is perhaps the most alive thing on the planet. In nature, life is everywhere. The trees are living, the animals are surviving, the sky is moving and the earth itself is rotating. I think people surround themselves with dead things, "materials," in order to avoid living. If we do not truly live, then we do not have to face our own mortality. In the broader spectrum of things, people fear their own death more than anything else. As animals are not perceived to consider their mortality, they live on a survival of the fittest structure, they do not have this problem. People, however, are incredibly complex creatures who choose to drown out nature: a world in which life and death is constantly in flux. Instead, we try to make life and death as mundane and routine as possible. Death has become a source of personal crisis when we must face it. Life, however, is not truly experienced because we live in a world of synthetics: plastic, concrete, electronics. All of these things create a wall dividing us from what is truly living in this world.