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Step outside your door. Greet your own personal infrastructure. It longs for you. Feast on what you discover.

Awaiting you is Life’s support system –your support system– cleansing itself and along with it you and me. Outside your door, you will find the glorious color, taste, smell, sound, and touch of spring, the sensations of the eternal return. Midst it all, the sun is shining through the emboldened Life Elements of air, water, and soil. The sun’s radiating beams immerse us —along with all animals, birds, insects, plants— in its unadulterated energy. Life in all its diversified forms is mixing Death into its self, bringing us wonder.

A terrifying microscopic virus tore a staggering hole in our polluted world. With Its companion —The Grim Reaper— they ripped open the poisoned fabric of our constructed world. All that you knew, all that you take for granted, all that you base your daily life on, has collapsed.

Sheltering-in-Place people —couples, singles, children, families, friends– have been leaning out of their windows singing, hitting pots and pans, recognizing their neighbors in joy, neighbors they barely looked at in the past. In the first weeks of the pandemic, we flocked especially to large urban places reserved for the Earth’s presence, such as Central Park in Manhattan Island. The Greenbelt in Staten Island, Pelham Bay Park in The Bronx, Forest Park in Queens, and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Now as we move toward summer, closed ocean beaches, river shores, forests, fields in more parks throughout our cities are cautiously reopening.

Why? Why? Do we seek out these places where the Earth emerges midst our constructions?

These places are us and we are them.

 

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