No one who looks into a gorilla's eyes — intelligent, gentle, vulnerable — can remain unchanged, for the gap between ape and human vanishes; we know that the gorilla still lives within us. Do gorillas also recognize this ancient connection?
- George Schaller, legendary wildlife biologist.

You see things differently by actively studying plants, flowers, weather, birds, over a long period. At my place, I’ve begun to have little recognitions of things that have been there all along but I haven’t no­ticed them before. They come clear in a different way than they do when you simply go out and study them. There’s a big, old live oak down in one end of the meadow I have walked by hundreds of times. I knew what it was—an interior live oak. I’ve crawled under it on sev­eral occasions. It was no mystery to me. But one day last spring, I stopped and took a look at it, and I really saw it. In a sense, it showed itself to me. No woo-woo about it. It wasn’t anything particularly magical or anything, it’s just that I really saw it. I could see that it was very old and that it had been through maybe one full fire that had burned it down, its base thickened by a rebuilt root stalk. Its wonder­fully complex arm structure was sheltering a horde of birds. I saw these forms as though for the first time.
It’s a gift; it’s like there’s a moment in which the thing is ready to let you see it. In India, this is called darshan. Darshan means getting a view, and if the clouds blow away, as they did once for me, and you get a view of the Himalayas from the foothills, an Indian person would say, “Ah, the Himalayas are giving you their darshan”; they’re letting you have their view. This comfortable, really deep way of getting a sense of something takes time. It doesn’t show itself to you right away.
      It isn’t even necessary to know the names of things the way a bot­anist would. It’s more important to be aware of the suchness of the thing; it’s a reality. It’s also a source of a certain kind of inspiration for creativity. I see it in the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. She had that eye, you know.
- Gary Snyder, Zen poet of the wild, and Dharma Bum, from the book Talking On The Water, Conversations About Nature and Creativity by Jonathan White.

Here’s the descrption of Talking On The Water from the liner notes.

During the 1980s and 90s, the Resource Institute, headed by Jonathan White, held a series of "floating seminars" aboard a sixty-five-foot schooner featuring leading thinkers and writers from an array of disciplines. Over ten years, White conducted interviews, gathered in this collection, with the writers, scientists, and environmentalists who gathered on board to explore our relationship to the wild.

White describes the conversations as the roots of an integrated community: "While at first these roots may not appear to be linked, a closer look reveals that they are sustained in common ground."

Beloved fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin discusses the nature of language, microbiologist Lynn Margulis contemplates Darwin's career and the many meanings of evolution, and anthropologist Richard Nelson sifts through the spiritual life of Alaska's native people. Rounding out the group are writers Gretel Ehrlich, Paul Shepard, and Peter Matthiessen, conservationists Roger Payne and David Brower, theologian Matthew Fox, activist Janet McCloud, Jungian analyst James Hillman, poet Gary Snyder, and ecologist Dolores LaChapelle.

By identifying the common link between these conversations, Talking on the Water takes us on a journey in search of a deeper understanding of ourselves and the environment.

. . .

In the mid-1990s, when I was putting the concept of Heron Dance together, I interviewed Jonathan White. My vague memory is that he was working as a carpenter/contractor in some small town on an island off the coast of Washington State. I asked him if there was any message from his time on the boat that he thinks about a lot, or found particularly meaningful. He responded:

Tess Gallagher, poet, who lives over in Port Angeles, was on the boat once and we were talking about writing, and she said, “You can’t go deep until you slow down.” There it is. You don’t have to say anything more.
When I first moved up here, I thought ‘God, there is a bunch of crazy people up here. They are all just weirdos. They left the city and they are all out of the closet. They’re just strange.”
I’ve come to believe that it is not them that are strange, but we are all strange. But we just don’t have a chance to be. It is not safe for us to come out with all our strangeness unless we are in an environment where we feel safe. And we know that people aren’t going to run away. Because they can’t. And we aren’t going to run away either. So you have confrontations with people, and then you see them the next day. And it is really different.
One little piece is community. I moved up here six years ago and I was scared to death to leave the city. I have always lived in the city. I was scared that there wouldn’t be anything to do. That I would be bored, not enough contact. I have really thrived up here. I have totally surprised myself. I am just eating up the small community, rural lifestyle. It is a big part of my life up here. Being with people. Being known. Allowing myself to be known. It is a whole other way.
            There are all kinds of lessons in it for me. One of them is that you don’t just walk away. It is like the environment – trashing places and moving away. It is the same in relationships. In an urban environment you don’t have to deal with the intimate issues you have to in a community. When you see people every day, when you celebrate with them. You see them at the potluck. You are in line with your accountant, and your lawyer and the commissioner and the person you got in a fight with yesterday. They are in your face. It is a tremendous exercise in tolerance, in seeing yourself in others.

. . .

I just looked up Jonathan, and see he’s moved on. Here’s his current website.