...Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a greet visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.
I'm all about green visits. I lead Nature Spirituality trips to our local prairie walk of La Chua trail to see Whooping Cranes and every spring I head to Central America to work with endangered parrots. In these places I fill up, for they are the Mecca of my heart, the hajj where my self blurs into the masses of species and experiences. Indeed it is a trick to see the glory in urban and devastated areas, for my mind wants to categorize this vision as not possibly "right" and not part of the whole.
In the summer of 2001 I visited Manhattan and one evening I lay on a bench looking up the lighted trunks of those twin towers. In that moment a healing took place, for I saw the world of cities, high economy, and a dearth and death of species as integral to whole. I came to a sense of fondness for the art of humanity that creates blights as well as lights upon the night.
That urban forest is me, and it became in a few months a scene of destruction. Does the tragedy negate the beauty? If the world contradicts itself, very well, it does, for it is large, as am I. I am the world, and I contain multitudes (a la Walt Whitman, acquaintance of Henry David Thoreau, resident of Walden).
As I am the world, and I am here to gain faith that I am whole, then I am the ashes of the Twin Towers, of Treblinka, of sugar cane monoculture killing tropical lands, and the ashes of quake produced fires in Haiti. I am also the phoenix who rises out of the ashes, me, the world, the universe, here temporarily now as the ashes of old stars. Would that me, the old, could see the new that is always there beyond apocalyptic nightmares.
What in you or the world or you do you reject or resist? Is there anything you are running from, and in the business, do not see the beauty and the tragedy of this moment?
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