Nothing Need Be Done
A 1988 interview with Gary Snyder, from the newly published anthology Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places
A 1988 interview with Gary Snyder, from the newly published anthology Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places
One morning in 1984, a letter posted on the other side of the world clacked through the flap of my door in Cape Town. It was from the poet, environmental activist, and longtime Buddhist Gary Snyder, a warm response to questions about his writing. I was a graduate student at the time and had been reading his work after a friend gave me a copy of his 1967 collection A Range of Poems. That first letter was the beginning of a long long-distance friendship and an ongoing conversation.
It started as an intellectual exchange and became an exploration of practice. As a young person living in a society demarcated by the paranoid logic of apartheid, I found it refreshing to meet the spaciousness of Gary’s way of seeing. His delight in wildness. Poems that opened up the idea of social justice to include nonhuman beings and the living world. The truly radical realization that things are not things but process, nodes in the jeweled net. And in all this a tendency simply to walk out of the narrow prison of dualistic thought.
Over the years, what has kept on bringing me back to Gary’s writing and to our conversation is his steady articulation of this vision in practice: Buddhist practice, the practice of writing, of being a householder, of living in places.
Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places puts together three interviews and a selection of letters from around 30 years. We recorded the first interview, an adaptation from which follows, in 1988 at Kitkitdizze, Gary’s home on the San Juan Ridge in the Sierra Nevada, where he is also a member of the Ring of Bone Zendo. It was a hot day in late August, and Carole Koda, his new partner, sat listening throughout.
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