The notion of going into nature to get away from life, to escape from a busy world or to create distance, rubs me the wrong way. Once nature becomes a place to break free, cement forests and four straight walls become our world. The Earth grumbles. The spherical and dynamic movement of elements doesn’t fit well in boxes. The notion of getting away should be falling into technology and succumbing to the angular world, leaving the swooping and growing world where we do belong. Home is a place filled with moving dirt, where hinges are the flexibility of branches, and the ceiling changes when it rains, where the light can be covered by grumbling clouds. Calling an address Home places each of us in straight and separate lines. When sidewalks and freeways divide us, our communities lose any sense of cohesion. Running into the forests or breathing in the mountains should not be an escape, rather, a homecoming. An ability to remember where the shiny grain of our oak front doors came from. The ability to sit and rest in the trees should not be getting away, rather getting back in -- back to where our world came from. After sifting through the massive amounts of material extricated from the earth, we should land back in the dirt. And instead of utilizing this dirt as a place where toes can spread out, we’ve found ourselves spinning, where someone somewhere finds a way to sift it and pack it and sell it. Palm trees do not grow in rows. They don't grow with white paint at the base. By shoving and nudging and pulverizing the world into our designed niches and corners, it's easy to forget we originate from a significantly softer place. Maybe the entropy of the universe has infiltrated our minds, forcing us to create a false sense of order by ripping apart the closed-loop systems to make conveyor belts and finish lines. But more realistically, we have a backward sense of where we belong. If living as a true omnivore, not a dertriovre, eating only dead things wrapped in plastic from a store, and living surrounded by glass separating us from the wind, and clicking in heels past trees planted in rows surrounded by cement sidewalk squares is what we consider home, we are living in self-delusion of where we belong.
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September 2022
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