Rocks and Streams and Love and Liberation – Dialogues with Ecology and Buddhist Practice in Gary Snyder’s Love Poems

After 1990, and increasingly in recent years, it became possible in South Africa to extend our focus in teaching and writing about literature to consider how the project of social liberation might relate to ecological awareness, or even spiritual experience. This essay is about some of the poetry by the North American writer Gary Snyder that I’ve found inspirational in this regard. His work embodies a lifetime’s lively conversation between ecological engagement and Buddhist practice and invokes the idea of liberation at many levels. At the heart of this is an image of the interconnected, nondual reality he calls in one poem ‘rocks and streams.’ This aspect of Snyder’s work is fairly well known, but how does it relate to the love poetry he has continued to write since the 1950s? What, if anything, do the poems about the love of a partner have to do with spiritual practice, and the core eco-Buddhist insights that have defined his writing? These are the questions that interest me here.