departures, returns

How is it that we speak of "straying" from ourselves? What can you do to return to to yourself if you have strayed; how might you know if you have; how long does it take to return - and is there a point of no return?
I would love to get answers to these questions from as many people as possible.
Of course, it's possible to think about these things on a more global scale, too - like in the book The Mushroom at the End of the World, an anthropological meditation on the now capitalist implications of the pursuit of the matsutake mushroom (a book I learned only of via a review of its French translation).
It seems like we expect that we are able to fathom the consequences of our pursuits and wanderings, given our "rational minds" - even though even a single jog through the country park may begin out of several reasons, give rise to several more, so have several possibly conflicting consequences to keep track of. A mushroom, the matsutake, that was once used in a symbolic gesture becomes not only the plaything of capital but signals potential ecological disaster that awaits us: in other words, man's straying from his place in nature may threaten to displace him from the landscape, not unlike in Rockman's painting "Manifest Destiny".
When I ask the trees my favourite question, "Why?!", they just move upwards, into the sky, or bring height to invisible birds calling across to each other. The song, the air, mud squishing, something happens along the way, along the run, thought becomes less rigid and there is a movement out of self, but not away: communing with nature. And then, the other day, I came across the tree below, that looked, from a very particular angle, to be holding up the sky (by the time I wrangled the camera out, the view had passed) - and I wondered might that actually be somewhat true? It could have to do with the interconnection of things... Like, how one person can hold another person up, figuratively, in tough times. Is the person really standing of their own accord? Lost and found...


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