Reading The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder at Round Valley Reservoir

Reading Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild on my lunch breaks, putting out the line at Round Valley Reservoir every other day. I'll probably fish shiners and marshmallow & mealworms into April and may start casting spinners soon, but have a lot of reading to do. Looking forward to bass fishing in May.

John caught nothing today, nor I.

The two young women I photographed as a blur, the photo resized in the camera, walked fast talking animatedly, too caught up in each other to be much aware of the wilds they traversed. But even intensely social activity outdoors results in the environment contributing to refreshment.

I feel as if I would go a lot deeper into the wilds if I had the money and time, needing to earn more money first to pay for the time. In our culture, wage work takes a lot of it, very difficult to rise above. But while I would and possibly may clam the bays behind Long Beach Island for more than a day's stint, I will never immerse myself in such an adventure as my 13 years' doing it commercially again, simply because I got the secrets I was after and don't need to leave everyone else behind once more. Besides, it's getting obvious that at my age, youthful adventure was just that. So I'm happy with as much as I do now, which is really no small matter.

Everything in existence has in essence natural identity, everything we synthesize a rearrangement of natural elements. Why is this important? Some portion of the wild nourishes, sustains, expands awareness and feeling wherever you are. Fundamentally, this is what we depend on. The air we breathe, for example. For me, all it takes is a look in the direction of and into some nearby trees to relieve an anxiety. So I have no need of paying the exhorbitant fees of a doctor, just to get a prescription of Lexapro or whatever, for which a doctor might get a kickback from a pharmaceutical company.

We're supposed to be hard-nosed Americans who grab our mother by the neck, force her down, and subjugate her to markets, selling her for the first fists of cash to come our way, but nature never really has been that woman conquered, and the time of reckoning is here: nature is the system we think we've built to subdue the wilds that may seem to threaten. We've derived each and every principle from nature, and it's an unsustainable contradiction to think we can master what is primary by what is secondary. How we live in a principled way will determine if we survive, the rules we enact according with reality.