Snyder: Our Primitive Connection To The Natural World

In his book, The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder acknowledges the primitive history of our relationship to the wild.  He uses the example of the aboriginals of Australia and their practice of dreamtime to demonstrate the connection between myth, landscape, and personal growth.  Myths are ancient narratives that attempt to answer enduring etiological and cosmological questions, inseparable from rituals that were performed in sacred landscapes.  Snyder observes “landscape, myth, and information were braided together in preliterate societies,” (83) and argues that our primitive connection to the wild is still present within us.  Is this “primitive” connection to the wild a doorway; a place where we are able to see our true relationship with the wild?  Is it our link to our home in the wild?  Gary Snyder says that walking through the wilderness is “so ancient a set of gestures as to bring a profound sense of body-mind joy” and “the point is to make intimate contact with the real world, real self.  Sacred refers to that which helps take us (not only human beings) out of our little selves into the whole mountains-and-rivers mandala universe” (94).  Few modern men have made this journey, the profits of old, the enlightened ones, the shaman, a handful of nature writers, and a few of the characters we've read about in this class.  If we don't practice connecting to the natural world, what have we lost?  The more I read the more I realize that the further we step away from our primitive connection to the natural environment the more we remove an integral and essential part of our consciousness that is necessary for any kind of authentic transcendence.