The other night we went out for Mexican food.
Sitting out on the patio, over looking a fast four lane street and the trees beyond.
I was feeling like I was back in Mexico, not the food, or the music, but the sun light, the wuality of the air, being next to the industry of the cars, just a feeling inside of being a traveler again.
I wondered when Mexico became Mexico. When it became a country, when was it simply indiginous peoples living with out a mapped, fenced, or walled boarder? I knew that Colorado was once a part of it.
What I was thinking in terms of colonialism was how all the world is now owned. I was thinking--experiencing in mind, the effect of knowinf that everything in front of us was owned and regulated by a person, tha everything beyond that was owned and regulated and beyond that more ownership and regulation, father than our eyes could reach, our minds could pick up signs of owner ship and regulation, no trespassing and 'do you belong here?'
I was thinking how heavy we have made our space.
How for millions of years humans and all other sentient beings roamed, walked land that was just open.
Something happens to the mind and I believe to the spirit when everything is operated like this, controled.
There is nothing wrong with safety, nothing evil about ownership, but it can become egoic. In becoming egoic the situation becomes heavier--that is to say our relationship to the physical world is actually affected by our approach and when everything is a concideration of ownerships and rights based in self-serving principals it can feel more difficult to move, ones body, effected by the mind state seems to weigh more in these circumstances.
I was thinking then in fact all these establishments werem, in effect, military bases.
All the paved roads, all the stop lights, all the buildings, these are more effective than walls. This infrastructure for economy is our security. Because we never bought this land in fairness, there is inhernet in our systems an uneasiness in operating here, in being here, in standing firmly. So to comensate, over and over we tear down the old and rebuild the new, never wanting the modes of the present to get out dated, like in war fare, like in the cold war, like in the space racem we want to be the best, the first. This drive is it economic? Is the economic a servant to security, the best defense...
So much structuring, so many hard angles, so many right angles and brick mortar.
We feel safe with walls.
We don't know the value of the forest.
We deforest the land for cattle.
We try so hard
to stand firmly.
We have put up so many walls
in our heads,
it is suffocating
and we look for the one
scouring the globe for the one,
the one who stangles us.
And United we stand.
About the Author
- Devin H-Rivard
- Laughing feels like flying. I love color and form, I love oil and acrylic painting, also figure drawing and calligraphic painting: wet, fresh ground ink on animal hair, that smell. Being in nature often feels better than being in my house. The air. The smell of plants after a rain in the afternoon, and its so dry here in Colorado, the atmosphere pulls the moisture right off the ground, even as it lands, not like in Washington where it pooled, and lingered and things begin to ferment and become rich with the returning ocean seeping through them.
