Home Ground 3
I know that I am fortunate. I don’t have to visit a city park to see how I fit into things; I live in a park, and I’m not alone. I reside among a community of fellow park-dwellers strung along Wolf Gap road like prayer beads on a rosary. I don’t live in a commune or anything like that; we’re neighbors. A lot of us don’t always see eye-to-eye on things. We have different histories, beliefs, and incomes. We live among forests and gardens, attend to the details of country life, and try to get along with one another as best as we can. We try to live a rural life while also juggling the demands of being members of contemporary American society. We’re not unique in these ways, but given the global demographics, our rural numbers are dwindling.
As I look around America and travel to various parts of the world, I see city life ramping up. Moving so fast, it’s hard to find time for others, nature, or even ourselves. Increasingly estranged from the natural world, and, I suspect, from the communal spirit that resides deep within us, yet crowded into ever more congested spaces, distracted, how do we continue forward together? It seems unlikely that a solution will be found in yet another round of technological advances, which simply allows us to further distance ourselves from the world around us and from direct contact with one another, caught inside an increasingly virtual matrix of life that for some people has become a substitute for reality and for others a mockery of it. To live a natural life, however modest and constrained, would seem to require being in the continuing presence of natural forces, anchored to a place, living moment by moment and in kind consideration of others.
(excerpt from Morning Coffee at the Goldfish Pond: Seeing a World in the Garden)
