Thought Made Cement

Real rain is so unfamiliar - now that it’s coming down the infants are mystified and the older children and adults are enjoying the utter transformations abounding around. Life booms and blooms in an instant; the fruit sweetens, raspberries appear from nowhere and whole generations of birds and animals experience luxuriant growth for the first time in their lives.

            The house possum sits on the scythe which projects from the tool pile in the corner by the sink, a happy reaper eating a carrot as the antechinus battles the python below. Mist mingles with wood smoke and incense, puffballs and mushrooms burst from the earth, fragrances fill the valley and hills.

            Yet it’s possible to miss all this, to ignore it and be totally unaware of the totality of life. It’s possible to sit in front of a television, book or computer and not lift one’s gaze to the real world, even in paradise. How much easier is it to ignore all but fantasies and artificial sensory extensions and filters - in the cities and towns?

            In most ‘settled’ sedentary places there is nothing available to the senses that was not placed by a human hand – not a stone nor tree. All that one can see, hear and smell is a direct product of a human being. For many people, the entire apprehensible world is literally concretized thought forms, dreams given a temporary material existence.

This is not a new phenomenon, but now so many more people can fill their waking and sleeping lives with often rich and seductive imagery strong enough to replace the need for a real life in the real world. At its best this sort of existence creates a space for expansion of the mind, soul and art – at worst it is a dismally unending dream always created by someone else. Either way it is divorced from all nature – except human nature. To live in a ‘modern’ city is to live inside the human mind, a self-reflecting hive displaying the narcissism of the species carried to its illogical conclusion – the decimation of the planet itself. Growth and the creative mind are channeled back into a feedback loop, while people wallow in grime, poisons and artificial ‘air’, convincing themselves they live in utter luxury.

Completely dependent on distant powers for their food, water and other necessities, most people don’t know (or seem to care) where these come from – or how fragile their access is to these prerequisites for life. A little historical perspective will show you just how expendable surplus ‘lords of the earth’ are – and how impermanent their civilizations are.

            What do you think the possum and the python have to say?