Living in Containers

It does seem that our current human perplexity about our very nature derives from our misperceptions and confusion regarding our relationship with our planet. After all, in our alienation from our planet, we are distanced from the meaning that it can provide. In our alienation, it is not so much that we really are distant, but that we fail to recognize our proximity. It can be said that a man lost in the woods is just as lost whether he be 100 yards or 100 miles away from the world he knows. In our case, it is not even 100 yards, but familiarity that is out of range. It is as though we have become lost in our own backyard.

This happens frequently in human aging. I recall a poignant moment recently in a well-to-do apartment complex. A nicely dressed elderly woman was wandering the halls – her halls – trying to find her front door. With her, it appeared to be a problem of memory associated with aging. In the human condition, however, we find ourselves searching for meaning at all ages.

We have for many generations wandered from the natural world, into a world of human making. Earth is covered with concrete. Speed and windshields separate our journey from the world beyond the asphalt roadway. Instead of reading the weather patterns and the flights of birds, the movements of animals or the curl of a leaf, we recline beneath our lamps and read books. Instead of talking with neighbors, we read the newspaper or internet. Instead of raising vegetables, we pick them up in plastic bags at the market. Instead of interacting with the Earth, we interact with human constructs.

The degree of difficulty in extricating ourselves from this alienation is directly related to the degree that the industrial/conceptual human construction has been amassed. Our freedom to create our concepts and our ability to turn these concepts into constructions has penned our very freedom into containers. We wander within these containers; driven by a deep instinct that home must be close by, but unable to quite reach it.