The Earth We Evolved To Inhabit Is

In Her Novel Regeneration, Pat Barker Writes Of A Doctor Who 'knew Only Too Well How Often The Early Stages Of Change Or Cure May Mimic Deterioration. Cut A Chrysalis Open, And You Will Find A Rotting Caterpillar. What You Will Never Find Is That Mythical Creature, Half Caterpillar, Half Butterfly, A Fit Emblem Of The Human Soul, For Those Whose Cast Of Mind Leads Them To Seek Such Emblems. No, The Process Of Transformation Consists Almost Entirely Of Decay.

I Grew Up With Landscape As A Recourse, With The Possibility Of Exiting The Horizontal Realm Of Social Relations For A Vertical Alignment With Earth And Sky, Matter And Spirit. Vast Open Spaces Speak Best To This Craving, The Spaces I Myself First Found In The Desert And Then In The Western Grasslands.

Musing Takes Place In A Kind Of Meadowlands Of The Imagination, A Part Of The Imagination That Has Not Yet Been Plowed, Developed, Or Put To Any Immediately Practical Use…time Spent There Is Not Work Time, Yet Without That Time The Mind Becomes Sterile, Dull, Domesticated. The Fight For Free Space — For Wilderness And Public Space — Must Be Accompanied By A Fight For Free Time To Spend Wandering In That Space.

The Things We Want Are Transformative, And We Don’t Know Or Only Think We Know What Is On The Other Side Of That Transformation Never To Get Lost Is Not To Live.

Memory, Even In The Rest Of Us, Is A Shifting, Fading, Partial Thing, A Net That Doesn't Catch All The Fish By Any Means And Sometimes Catches Butterflies That Don't Exist.