July 31, 2026

You Already Live Here

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

Gary Snyder wrote this in The Practice of the Wild, published in 1990, after decades of living on a homestead in the Sierra Nevada foothills and years of Zen training in Japan. He was pushing back against the common idea that nature is a scenic backdrop for weekend trips, something separate from ordinary life. For Snyder, being at home meant knowing your watershed, your local plants, the actual ground under your feet. It turns the abstract idea that everything is connected into a concrete practice of paying attention to the specific place you already stand in.