Old New World
Walking the quiet morning trails of Prospect Park I tried to imagine what the world looked like around me at the birth of this city. Wild and beautiful. Daydreaming like a child about living in the dirt where I came from. Close to the bugs and birds. Close to myself. I yearn for early mornings filled with milking goats and collecting eggs. Gardening the afternoon away in the heat of June to the tune of the wind playing off the black walnut trees sending their delicate scent to distract my nose from the earthy rotting smells of the compost pile in the corner of our family’s small plot of land. I wish to abandon my ways in this holy cement and metal structured city. This place millions of us have made pilgrimage to in search of what we believed to be the answer. Only to realize what we were searching for, what we really needed, was what we left in that small town back west.
Angelo, a great man of average height with a Dominican version of Mona Lisa’s smile of mischief pulled across his tanned brown face sings more than he speaks. He is either 18 or 65 depending on how the shadows cast across his face. I first noticed him early Monday morning, before the droves of shut-ins poured into the park to ground their bodies into the great lawns that covered its otherwise wild wooded paths. He was so content. No mask. No gloves. Just man in nature. Not a care in the world. Dirt under his nails and painted across his sweaty forehead. I formally met Angelo a few days later on one wet early evening near the peninsula of Prospect Park. He was whistling a song I did not know and for a moment I was able to forget the world around me, sit on a nearby covered bench and watch him as he cheerily built a natural wooden structure from the sticks and tree limbs the storm had sacrificed the night before.
Using a pine branch to dust the ground around his little hut, he smiled, “I never lived near natural spaces like this, I miss the dirt but I ain’t never lived in it. Grew up in Pelham Bay, moved here with my lady a few years ago. Just down East Flatbush. I started walking the park when we went into lock down, for the first time in 23 years I couldn’t go to work. Couldn’t provide. My wife works. She’s a nurse. I had to find a way to keep myself busy during the day when she was gone. So I set off walking. One day I took off my shoes and just started building. I can’t get enough! I love the way the dirt and moss and grass smell on my hands. The cold ground under my feet. It just feels right. I send my lady pictures of my creations. I tell her I’m building her a summer home”. He lets out a big belly laugh and keeps digging out the “fire pit”. I sat quietly there sipping my coffee as my dog carried on with his work. I pulled down my handmade mask and closed my eyes. The rain gently fell on the roof and the land around me. This stillness takes me to my childhood growing up in the high deserts of California. Quiet and open and wild. And Angelo found that in the middle of New York. It’s here too. It’s everywhere if you look for it.
As we have shifted into organic and locally sourced foods, skincare, and clothing, so has this movement seeped into every other aspect of our lives. From alternative medicine and healing modalities to “green” dry cleaners and even eco friendly banana peel burials. Farmers markets shooting up from 3,000 in 1999 to over 9,000 in 2020. Our 9–5s, commutes, personal upkeep, laundry, dinner, holidays, birthdays, parent- teacher conferences, bills, healthcare, selfcare, selfies, tweeting, posturing, consuming has claimed every spark of energy we emit and left us at the end of every day, week, year feeling more exhausted and demoralized than the day before. Yet our hunger grows. We have reached the age where we understand what our parents warned us against, “One day when you grow up…”. We’ve become zombies craving the blood of the next sneaker drop. The newest iphone. The #perfectbrunchoutfit. The jig is up. None of it mattered in the before time and matters even less now. What is being asked of us is a return to our nature loving selves. To slow down. Touch the earth with our bare feet and sit with ourselves. To let the inside out. Reclaiming the streets of the city, from farmers markets and rooftop gardens to outdoor dining. Turning closed streets into inner city potted parks. Paving the parking lots with a paradise long gone but never forgotten.
There is this undeniable thing we are missing. The searching has become desperate. This great hole inside and out we cannot fill it or even name it. We’ve spent hundreds of years wandering this stolen land and will wander a hundred more until we have dug up every corner of dirt looking for “It”. Some say it is our legacy to drift blindly, like the Spaniard explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in 1527, losing hundreds of men to sickness and death and himself only to find he did not want to be found. Discovering himself in the harsh wetlands of what is now called Florida and the great Appalachian Mountains. Fearing civilization more than the wild, he never quite came back from. Shedding himself over and over in the great search. And so now must we. We cut down forests to build cathedrals so we can ask God to help us, save us, have mercy. A space with man made rules and restrictions. Until every instinct is manufactured to benefit the bottom line. We are sick and tired of being sick and tired. But maybe it is simple silence that is being asked of us in this New World. Slow down. Breathe. A return to the noble savage. Return to self in the face of the corrupting influence of the shortsighted exponential growth of the almighty dollar. Pandemic induced stillness. A collective moment to reset and rebuild this city to the paradise lost to our daily lists and “have tos”. It is up to us to reimagine and rebuild this city, those of us who have stayed.
Dear reader, it is up to you.
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