Reflection 5

Shifting through the embers is absolutely haunting. It is I guess a metaphor for our wanton destruction of nature and the ultimate cost of this is not the gold but all that was lost.

I am hesitant to buy into Gary Snyder’s argument so quickly. His idea of what rethinking our geo-political boundaries sounds nice but I don’t know if this alone would be so firm as to reaffirm a sense of community in specific areas. Especially in urban areas where this “connection” to the land is so heavily obscured by what are literally sepreating people from the land underneath them. I feel like what he is saying is that small rural to suburban communities need to come together to “protect”, really to defend against non-locals, areas that sustain them. This is true, but I don’t know if a redefinition, even a paradigmal one is entirely necessary on a geologic scale. Rather I think the separation is purely on a social scale, the trajectory of interactions is increasing in the meta-physical realm and this hurts the physical connection people have with one another, and subsequently the physical connection people have to place.

I’ve indirectly connected physical interactions with people to a connection to a physical place. Taking a step back I’d like to flesh this out further. Is it the social interactions we have in a physical place that contribute to a connection to the place itself? Or can a strong connection to a physical space be attained solely on the basis of non-social interactions? I have had plenty a sojourn into the woods by myself and contemplated the beauty of the natural aesthetic, thought it quite nice to see the trees and birds and insects. But can one truly be connected to a place that one spends their time completely alone within? Of all the places that hold the most importance it is of those I’ve spent time with people in that are crucial, that come before the places I’ve only gone into by myself. I don’t think that a place alone with you is enough, maybe for Thoreau; he found enough merit to write so eloquently for the places he’d stay by himself. But even then I’ve read that Thoreau insisted on frequent visits from his friends during his stay at Walden, and along each of his journeys it includes descriptions of interactions he has had along the way. I think maybe it would appear at first to not be important, or even that the places we engage with alone would come out on top. Maybe the places where we can have the most opportunities to reflect and appreciate the subtly of nature and land are the places that rank the highest on our lists of that which twist our sinews. Or maybe it is the time spent with other people in these places that capture the importance of the place itself, a respect for the space which provides the setting and atmosphere for our complex and rewarding and awful human social interactions to happen within. It even provides a temporal net to capture these fading collisions of dynamic egos and growing pains, so that one day in deep nostalgia you can recede to this places (physically or meta-physically) and relive that which has transpired.

            Maybe in the ashes of those burnt books of lore are where all of these stories have gotten lost to.