She Abides

When I walk in more developed areas - cities, towns, villages - settlements - places where the humans have developed the land and covered it with roads and dwellings, I look around and spy the Wild Earth that the infrastructure is built upon. Sometimes I have to look into the distance for the crest of a near hill or ridge - I look for the roll and shape of the earth beneath the skin of development and paths of busy people, hunkered over devices, rushing along. 

Sometimes I play a game with myself and imagine that the concrete disappears - that suddenly I have stepped into a time machine and gone back to before the burgeoning expanse of humanity came to the place - I pretend that the roads, buildings, cars, concrete and blacktop vanish and there it is - the Earth - the wild world that abides beneath the encrustments of humanities often unconscious behavior.

I feel comforted, supported knowing that Earth abides beneath the sidewalk.  Urban/suburban development is new. The bulk of history is one of a fecund, soft, flowing ecology - a living breathing Earth filled with relationships.

See the land beneath the city - this kind of imagining has lead me to find the topography of developed areas - I find drainages, I see where the land has clefts, valleys, promontories that so often are obscured by the bridges, roads, and buildings of modern society. By pretending that  the development is gone I am able to appreciate and investigate nature in places where it seems to be absent. But Nature is always present. It does not matter what we have clothed her with - she is there - beneath the development.

She abides.