The land and human awakening

What is the one thing that awakens the human consciousness. To me the answer to this mystery lies in reclaiming our sense of self that we mortgaged to the world. Until we understand what the land is? How it relates to our mind, body and spirit? Man will always be at odds with himself….there will always be something amiss about his existence….he can’t quiet put his finger on it….but something doesn’t sit well. That is because without the land, he is like a sailor marooned in the seas without a compass.

For those who feel this heavy sensation of emptiness in their lives and who truly desire to understanding it for what it is and not what others say it is. It is necessary for them to reconnect with the land – to even turn their backs from the concrete jungle, the highways, the places that’s always suffused in perpetual light and sound – and re-enter the silence of the lands. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in – to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them – neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them – and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.