10.4.2026 – one word to you, your

one word to you, your
children, stay together learn
the flowers – go light

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

By Gary Snyder as published in No Nature: New and Selected Poems (Pantheon Books, 1992).

In the book, The etiquette of freedom : Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison, and The practice of the wild by Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison (Counterpoint: Berkeley, CA, 2010), Professor Scott Slovic wrote about this poem:

The last three lines of Gary’s poem “For the Children” are “stay together / learn the flowers / go light.”

“Stay together”: pay attention to the importance of community. Work with each other. Even if you have opposing perspectives, even if you come from different cultural traditions, find a way to work together to stay together.

“Learn the flowers”: notice your surroundings and learn about them. To me, “learn” implies actively studying something—not just learning what it looks like on a superficial level, but actually engaging in an energetic and deliberate effort of study. This, too, is something that I think is very important about Gary’s work: he’s not operating solely on an aesthetic level he’s made an active effort to study the cultural traditions, the languages, and the natural history that he absorbs into his poetry.

And finally, “Go light”: pay attention to your actual lifestyle, to the practical aspects of your life. Try to have a light impact on the planet and on the cultural communities that you are intersecting with. “Go light” means “live carefully.” So: stay together, learn the flowers, go light. I think many of us who work in the field of literature and environment carry these three lines around with us everywhere we go, with thanks to Gary Snyder.

stay together / learn the flowers / go light

“Stay together”: pay attention to the importance of community, work with each other

“Learn the flowers”: notice your surroundings and learn about them

“Go light” : pay attention to your actual lifestyle, live carefully

In the next century or the one beyond that,

… For the Children

Back in the day, my Dad realized I had a restless soul and was always on the lookout for something that might catch my interest.

Often he would come find me and say there was a great movie on TV.

That’s how I first got see Boom Town with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy and The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart.

That’s how I first got to see Union Pacific with Dad waiting for his favorite scene where the ruffian on the train used a bull whip to get a teddy bear down for the overhead storage racks for a young girl.

One time he came to me to tell me that the local Army Reserve unit was offering free classes for kids in learning Morse Code.

That one I avoided.

Then he offered to teach me about photography and how to use a darkroom.

Dad himself was an amateur photographer having liberated some very fine camera’s in Germany and then buying himself a Nikon as well as setting up his own photo lab in the basement.

He spent hours with me both in hands on lessons and in commentary on my finished work as well as a ton of money on this investment.

Every once in a while I would produce a print of the lakeshore or something else and he would look at if for a long time then say outloud, “That’s just how it looks.“

That was the accolade.

Dad also went out and bought me a book that I kept for years titled The Amateur Photographer’s Handbook by a Aaron Sussman that I read through more than once and returned to it over and over to re-read certain sections.

It was not only informative and complete on the subject but was engagingly written with commentary that often went beyond photography.

Here is Mr. Sussman’s open paragraphs in the chapter titled, The Picture.

There are pictures everywhere.

Can you learn to see them, or will you. like Peary’s cook, be searching forever for a point of view? The explorer’s cook is so perfect a symbol of the unseeing eye, that his story is worth repeating for that reason.

I first heard about him from Ruth Seinfel and her husband Gerald Goode. It seems that a well-meaning friend stumbled on the cook one day and decided that there was a “marvelous story in the man.” He had been with Peary through all of his historic adventures—and his point of view was so different; he saw it all against the background of food and hungry men. There was at least a book in the man, if not a whole series of magazine articles. And since Ruth and Gerald were “literary people” (they wrote stories and got them published), the friend insisted that they must do something about his “find.” Ruth was skeptical (she had once been a book-review editor) but out of courtesy to the friend she invited Peary’s cook to visit them at Croton.

He came with what he explained were “all his notes.”’ Ruth and Gerald decided that perhaps they had been wrong about the man, invited him to stay for supper, and then took him out to see the local sights. One oi these, of course, was the Croton Reservoir. When they got there, they found some other people looking around. This seemed to trouble the cook very much. No sooner did Ruth or Gerry maneuver him over to one interesting vantage point than the cook noticed some people elsewhere looking at something else, and he had to be taken there at once to see what the others were seeing. When he got there, the others had in the meantime moved on; so the cook lost interest in that place, wondered out loud about what the others had seen, and then noticed some people off in the distance pointing at something else. Which meant that Ruth and Gerry had to take him there, too. This kept on until Gerry got bored and Ruth got tired; so they took their guest home.

After supper they started checking through his notes. Have you guessed? Yes, his notes were complete. On the day, for instance, that the North Pole was discovered, his records showed that he had prepared and the men had eaten “so many pounds of this and so many pounds of that.”” How did the men feel about the discovery, what did they do, what did Peary say? Oh, he wouldn’t know about that. He was just the cook!

Most of us are “just cooks” when it comes to seeing things around us. We need distant pastures to prove that grass is green; we need far horizons to prove that skylines have beauty; we must travel before we can shake our “picture blindness.””

But our picture sense can be developed, in two ways: (1) by looking at pictures made by others, and (2) by making an imaginative effort to create pictures of our own.*

I was probably around 14 when I read that for the first time and it had as much influence on me as anything else I ever read.

I talked to Dad about it.

That two people could look at the same scene and one person would wonder just what the other person was seeing.

As I remember Dad agreed with Mr. Sussman about picture blindness and that your picture sense could be developed.

“You got to be interested in everything,” I remember Dad saying.

And that described Dad.

He WAS interested in everything.

He knew the names of birds and could identify bird song and have a long discourse on the making of cheese with the guy in a cheese shop as well as discuss the merits Boston Whaler motorboats and the latest advances in orthodontia (something he described as a great racket).

And he could fix anything.

Once, out in the middle of nowhere on M45 past Allendale, Michigan, when a radiator hose came apart and disabled his car and a passerby stopped to help, Dad found a stick and took out his swiss army knife and whittled two plugs that he used to block either end of the engine’s coolant system where the hose connected, all while talking with the passerby about how long it might take a wrecker to arrive, provided they could get somewhere where there was a phone. With the hand whittled plugs in place, Dad turned to the guy and said that should get him to a gas station and with the passerby shaking his head, Dad drove off and made it to a gas station.

The point of all this is that, reading Mr. Snyder’s line about Learn the flowers, I told myself that I knew what he meant.

Notice your surroundings and learn about them.

That was a lesson I got from my Dad a long time ago.

Maybe most of us are “just cooks” when it comes to seeing things around us.

But I can truly say, that’s not how I was raised.

Postscript: This is one of the images I took with my Dad’s Nikon and printed with his help.

I wanted to achieve some sort of texture to the black and white print so Dad suggested we go buy some heavy lined photographic paper at Arden’s Camera store over on the west side of Grand Rapids.

I said that sounded good.

In the darkroom, I suggested something I had read about where we put a screen over the paper for a few seconds of the exposure but I didn’t know how we did that.

Dad told me to go take the screen out of my bedroom window and we put that over the paper and exposed the image for 5 seconds, then took the screen away and set the exposure for another 25 seconds.

When we were done, and I had the final print, Dad said, that is just how it looks.

I took the picture on a vacation trip from Pittsburgh Landing, Mississippi on the Tennessee River.

It is part of the Shiloh Battlefield National Military Park.

This is where Grant’s soldiers were driven back on the 1st day of battle, against the river when Grant showed up, organized a defense and on the 2nd day drove the Confederates back.

While I was taking the picture Dad was back in the parking lot where a young family was locked out of their car.

That Dad was telling my Dad he was ready to smash the window but Dad kept looking at the car and figured out a way to open they side window (levering it open enough for one of skinny kids to sneak an arm in and un latch the window) then figured away to reach inside and unscrew the window and unlock the door.

Dad always noticed his surroundings and learned about them.

He for one, wasn’t just a cook.

*The Amateur Photographer’s Handbook by Aaron Sussman (Crowell: New York, 1962).