the dharma blog

There’s more to the story, but I’ll make it brief for now: when Katie and I were in San Francisco we saw Gary Snyder do a reading at City Lights Bookstore. It was monumental.

We met a couple great guys in line waiting to meet Gary afterwards. Everyone was giddy and blissful. We could have got stuck by some of the weenie poetry type guys about my age with ponytails and scarves and way too much pretension. But no, we got to talk with Paul and Jim.

Paul, 50, moved to Seattle from Missouri when he was 20 years old because he read The Dharma Bums. Climbs Rainier. Drove down just to see Gary.

Here’s the poem he said was a real beauty from the book of Gary’s that Katie happened to have in her bag:

A Walk
Sunday the only day we don’t work:
Mules farting around the meadow,
       Murphy fishing,
The tent flaps in the warm
Early sun: I’ve eaten breakfast and I’ll
       Take a walk
To Benson Lake. Packed a lunch,
Goodbye. Hopping on creekbed boulders
Up the rock throat three miles
       Puite Creek –
In steep gorge glacier-slick rattlesnake country
Jump, land by a pool, trout skitter,
The clear sky. Deer tracks.
Bad place by a falls, boulders big as houses,
Lunch tied to belt,
I stemmed up a crack and almost fell
But rolled out safe on a ledge
       and ambled on.
Quail chicks freeze underfoot, color of stone
Then run cheep! away, hen quail fussing.
Craggy west end of Benson Lake — after edging
Past dark creek pools on a long white slope –
Lookt down in the ice-black lake
       lined with cliff
From far above: deep shimmering trout.
A lone duck in a gunsightpass
       steep side hill
Through slide-aspen and talus, to the east end,
Down to grass, wading a wide smooth stream
Into camp. At last.
       By the rusty three-year-
Ago left-behind cookstove
Of the old trail crew,
Stoppt and swam and ate my lunch.

Gary has written many a fantastic poem, this is one of them. I’ll keep repeating it until I don’t care to anymore.

Why? What is it’s appeal? Well, it has sentimental value because it was the one Paul pointed out to us. But, the more I read it the more I find other reasons to like it.

I like it because there is the vivid action of the poet himself, my favorite example being: “I stemmed up a crack and almost fell / But rolled out safe on a ledge / and ambled on.” And I like it because of the action of the natural world: the mules farting; the tent flapping; the trout far below in their own lake world; the lone duck soaring along on its own mission.

On top of that independent action, there is the physical interaction between the poet and the world. The trout skittering as he lands by their pool; the quail chicks – so a part of the natural world they are the color of stone – running away as he comes by (and here, the suggestion of innocent humor that is necessary to fully capture such a day, “cheep!”); the poet finally wading and then swimming in the water, the ultimate act of being engulfed in the natural world.

Existing alongside all the action and interaction is the description of a perfect day. What is beautiful is that Gary saw the simple poetry of the day – the morning sun warming the camp; hopping along the mountain stream; swimming in the high alpine lake and then eating lunch in the afternoon – and that he took the time to write it down. Interacting with the natural world is simple, he tells us, it is accessible like this poem. Just look around, witness what is going on with an open mind.

The natural world is our world as much as the deer, the trout, the quail, the duck. If we simply accept the fact, we will know it to be true.

i wrote and tried to post this this morning. irrelevant now, but i’ll still put it out there for the historical record.

what a rough one. and it’s not over yet. i don’t like where things sit, but much remains to be seen. many fights remain to be fought. and
many votes remain to be counted.i don’t like ohio’s secretary of state, ken blackwell. he will probably end up making florida’s katherine harris look like thomas jefferson. he’s been pulling shady, highly-partisan manuevers for months now, including one of the worst anti-registration moves of the campaign when he tried to invalidate thousands of voters by saying they registered on the wrong weight paper…

now he’s helpfully told the bush camp that bush’s lead is “statistically insurmountable,” giving andy card the soundbite of the morning while kerry sits and assesses the situation without the benefit of a friendly in the secretary of state’s office.

i don’t feel good, but i won’t resort to defeatism yet. that attitude comes too easily to me anyway. as such, i’ll post the highlight of my morning, from an email kos received:

Bush is currently leading in Ohio by 136,221.

If there are 250,000 provisional ballots outstanding. The highest number I’ve seen.

And 90% of those ballots are good, as they were in 2000. That leaves 225,000 votes.

If 85% of those ballots prove to be for Kerry, about the number that Gore got in 2000. That leaves us with 191,250, giving us a lead of 55,029.

If there are only 200,000 provisionals, following the same calculation would leave us with a lead of 16,779.

If the provisional ballots are only 175,000 that leaves us with a deficit of -2,346 that will leaves us in a position to get an automatic statewide recount.

Or, to put it another way, an automatic recount is triggered by a margin of 0.25% or between 13,000 and 16,000 votes.

i still think kerry should have held out. his concession speech was beautiful, but with all the fight left in so many people, there was energy there that could have been harnessed to oppose the march of neoconservativism.

kerry made reuniting the country a big part of this morning and this afternoon, he reportedly told bush in his phone call that it was important to put divisiveness behind us and try to bring people together. and that was how he started his remarks in boston.

i didn’t see bush’s speech, but it was pretty obvious that the headline on CNN.com summed it up: “America has spoken.” bush feels that the 52% of the people who voted for him equals america and there didn’t seem to be anything in his comments about trying to appease the rest of us in any way.

my dad relayed an anecdote yesterday afternoon as we were discussing the last four years. he said he saw a documentary where somebody asked cheney if they (the bush administration) had put any thought into how they could unite the country and pursue moderate policies in the face of the fact that bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and because of all the contention surrounding the election then: cheney just replied, “yeah, for about 30 seconds, then we got to work.”

same goes for today, now that it can be said that they do operate with a mandate of sorts, being re-elected and receiving the popular vote. i fear for the next four years. i won’t deny it. i’m scared.

when i first saw katie. her looking fragile and nervous in a dress i had not seen up ’til that moment and pulling her close. the photographers disappearing after a minute and the two of us left alone in the sanctuary, my hands on her waist and hers on my shoulders. almost in tears but not. and when after a minute i said to her “don’t be nervous” and she said “i’m not anymore.”

the beauty of our friends and family (and literally, our family, once we turned around and were presented as mr. and mrs. gregory seitz) applauding after father gerry kaiser concluded his reading from letters katie and i had written to him before the ceremony. we wrote frankly about each other and about life and our relationship and love and all these wonderful people applauded. in church!

coming into the room after cake cutting to see only ryan and katie h left at the head table and everyone clinking their glasses for a kiss, ryan with his arm on the back of her chair immediately, then one very brief but delicious-looking kiss.

swirling in the middle of the packed dance floor, looking around the cozy room at maybe 100 people, a disparate bunch, a group of people that would only come together for one thing: the wedding of myself and katie. my friends, her friends. my aunts, her aunts. my parents’ friends, her parents’ friends. people that have but one thing in common: our union.

standing at the side of the floor with my arm around wade’s shoulders and his around mine, telling him that it was the happiest day of my life. knowing it to be more true than i could put in words. and then a moment, and then wade telling me that it was the happiest day in his life too.

my beautiful mother dancing to ‘hey ya’ by outkast.

standing forehead to forehead with my bride in the middle of the dance floor, rocking gently and looking around at the floor packed with beautiful couples of all ages and from all over our lives, dancing the last dance to elton john’s “the piano man.”

and that was just that one day. more to come.