Hmmmm, somewhere in my wandering the bardos yesterday I forgot to post this entry…Now, you’ll just have to deal with a couple extra entries for today.
I went wandering down to the local coffeeshop and library, they both exist in the same vast parking lot and strip mall area here. On the way home, I decided to attempt finding a path directly across the wooded canyon floor, somewhere just beside the prison-looking middle-school yard. I could see some kids hanging around down near a graffiti-covered cement drainage ditch. As I got closer, I decided not to walk up on the kids, and instead, to walk up through a more wooded area marked with piles of bike parts, old stoves and dishwashers, and unrecognizable decomposed remains of suburbia-gone-by.
The trash expands into an area I might call “ruins.” In the center of these ruins, I found a shack made of plywood, paint, and other chunks of wood. It had a chain with a padlock holding its plywood door shut. I didn’t stay around long enough to meet any of my newly revealed neighbors. I just quietly celebrated the human ingenuity and boldness it must have taken to construct and dwell in this fashion.
If you remove the desperation, labels, roles, and laws from the situation, you might find that this little shack expresses something about humanity that many humans celebrate in the form of movies such as Lord of the Rings. A human shire might look a lot like a collection of plywood shanties in the woods. Minus the pressures of legality and normality, the shanty town might not have a surrounding of garbage, but rather a surrounding of gardens.
When I see Lord of the Rings, I ask myself, “How can I live more like the hobbits, now, today, in my current place and time?”
Any advice, hints, suggestions?
-GTD
