One is only lost when they’re holding themselves to
a trajectory that may not be destined for them. Panning further out of the map’s
drawn onto your life, that you’ve come to accept as your defining reality,
allows the path to meander more in the ways the universe might have planned for
it. I’ve been thinking a lot about English gardens lately, and how they’ve
corrupted our view of nature, that we can control it and whip it into a nice,
orderly shape, that’s unnatural in nature, and also requires a lot of work.
This also came in vogue during a time when English culture was dominating the
Earth, and could subjugate enough other folks to do all the necessary dirty
work to maintain those impossibly unnatural but perfectly humane gardens. In
the idea of living with nature, we’ve lost sight of the “with” part, thinking
nature has to bend to our human will. Shit’s gonna grow the way it wants to,
without asking us. We can tend things so that they’re being heard, and grow in
directions sort of beneficial to ourselves as well as them. Or we can keep
applying these colonial control mentalities all over everything, and try to
pound it all to where we want it, yelling “Dominion! Over! The! Earth!
Dominion! Over! The! Earth!” while we beat on it. If we can’t live with nature,
mutually, it leaves us, or stops paying attention to us, or worse yet still
sits there acting like it’s listening to us and caring still, but it’s not – it’s
secretly plotting how to poison us while we’re not looking, slipping arsenic
into our slave corn, or some shit like that.
I feel like I could use more pilgrimages nowhere,
on foot, just meandering ass seven to twelve mile loops through nothing in
particular, to better connect with each step, and see the ditches and trees and
cracks in the asphalt way better. I tend not to see them too well zipping
through a productive industrial modern American life all that much. And this
fucked up late capitalist American life is just the bastard child of English
gardens anyways.
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