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Cold Mountain
My home was at Cold Mountain from the start,
Rambling among the hills, far from trouble.Gone, and a million things leave no trace
Loosed, and it flows through the galaxies
A fountain of light, into the very mind—
Not a thing, and yet it appears before me...All I can say to those I meet:
"Try to make it to cold mountain."Copyright © 1966 Gary Snyder
I am one of those people who has stayed too long in college. I have picked up a couple of degrees along the way and am now a student once more, this time pursuing graduate studies in Library and Information Science. (click here for an interesting web page by a fellow student, with links to and information on library science) Having run headfirst into the idea of "information as thing"— a concept which first struck me as alien— I have given the idea a good long look and decided that the world itself, and everyone in it, can be viewed as information. (this may be similar to what the German philosopher Wittgenstein meant by his open-ended statement, "The world is all that is the case") The question is, What is the world saying? And is anyone listening? I am beginning to feel comfortable with the idea of world as information and, within that context, the idea of myself as a librarian. I read books, I write books, and I live in the world. Therefore, as a student of information, I not only consume and produce information, I offer information to others as the very thing that is offered to me by the world, and is the world. The idea no longer seems strange.
In 1971 I moved from Oklahoma to California and found myself in a new life that eventually included a job at REI Co-op in Berkeley, being a student of Zen Buddhism, and eventually working for the Sierra Club on Mt. Shasta as the custodian of the Sierra Alpine Lodge at 8,000 feet. I lived on the mountain for two summers and various parts of the autumn, winter, and spring. The caretaker's job paid $400 a month and all the fresh spring water I could drink. It was perhaps the best job I have ever had. I moved back to Oklahoma a decade later. Oklahoma is my home and I always knew I would return here, but I haven't forgotten the lessons I learned from my friends and teachers at the various zen centers where I lived and studied, at REI, and on Mt. Shasta itself.
There was a Buddhist teacher in Japan in the 13th century named Dogen Kigen who, when he was living on a mountain as the head of a monastery, wrote a poem expressing his understanding of the world and of his life . The poem goes like this:
Maybe we can say the snow is information and the mountain is the world, or reality. Maybe not. Dogen might have said that the snow, and the mountain, are Mind. Big Mind. Open Mind. Empty Mind. With an emptiness that is filled to the brim with life. With information. Thinking this way gives me a whole new perspective on information and what it is to be a librarian, so I like to think this way. And in return for all the things that have been given to me, or maybe just for the joy that's in it, I want to be a librarian of the open mind, the empty mind, and see what the mind, the ultimate library, will be filled with. The idea behind this web site is to share some of the gifts that have been given me, and to go where this may take me. So please accept my small gifts, my writing and my experience— my library of the mind— and permit me this small advertisement. Also, don't forget to listen to what the world is saying.Nothing in my life has left me a trace of the path.
I have lost my way between the true and the false.
For long days the snow has covered the mountain.
This winter I am aware that the snow is the mountain.
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