City life-country life

Being back in Cuenca after the field always seems a little strange adjusting. From remote isolation and wilderness to the urban bustle of the city. Such is my life. A life of contrast and paradox. Still working on balance though.

A friend asked in a letter if I only felt spiritual attachment to nature. In wild places there is spirit everywhere if you know how to look and listen. Slow down a little and you may just learn something. There is a poster I saw once that showed the Earth as a miniscule speck in the universe, amongst innumerable distant stars and the black void of the solar system. It is our only home and the only place we know of where life exists in the monstrous vastness of the cosmos.

The point is, only here is there life and the spirit that animates life. Just a thin green membrane that pulses delicate like a spiderweb over our planet in an otherwise vast lonely universe. Those places where that pulse is strongest, where I feel it the strongest, are in wild places where we have a small footprint. Where there is a plethora of life wrapped up so tightly and complex we can't even fathom the nuaces. So much for physics as a complicated science try understanding ecology. Cities channel away resources from the land, consume but do not produce or give back. Inputs of resources taken from natures capital, outputs typically of waste and human pollution. I'm not trying to say I hate cities, quite the contrary I love cities and the culture and diversity of people that create them, but the spirit is not there for me. The great diversity of life forms evolved everywhere else over millenium and so tightly wound, is now replaced by a reduced system. A great expanse of industry and concrete instead of a forest or grassland, the plethora of life forms before replaces now by just one, us.

The great urban concrete spaces it is only a faint murmur, a whisper compared to those other places. So that is the long answer to that question. All the same its nice to be back in Cuenca for a bit. Wild places fulfill one part of me, my spirit, but contact with people fulfills my shared humanity and place as a human being amongst my kind.

Like I said, still working on balance :)

This ones for you kid.