Sometimes you move through the city
and feel in your bones how strange and new this all is.
The spectacle of modern civilization,
just barely older than you are.
With all its cramped logic,
its rules and gridlines and
rigid justifications for why the world must be the way it is.
But there's a part of you that thinks:
you are not at home here.
That still remembers Eden,
and longs to return.
Ballagàrraidh.
The story of humanity is a move from the countryside to the big city.
But it's happening so fast that our brains are still stuck in the hinterlands.
So now there's a part of you that longs to leave your car idling in traffic,
and flee into the wilderness.
To live off the land,
without tools or simulations,
to experience nature in all its simplicity
raw, indifferent, and ferociously real.
To feel the lushness and harshness of the wild,
the clarity of eating and killing and growing stronger,
the dumb luck of surviving the night.
But another part of you knows that Eden is a fantasy,
and you'll always be floating just above it,
trailing clouds of civilization wherever you go.
Even our ancient symbols of nature are deeply unnatural.
The plants we eat are sterile, swollen, unrecognizable to the food chain.
Our domesticated animals are caricatures of their wild ancestors.
The family dog is just another piece of technology,
And you too are a domesticated animal,
shrouded in synthetic fibers and synthetic thoughts.
Even if you sleep in the woods with a stove and a backpack,
everything from the buzzing in your ears
to the howling in the distance
will be trying to tell you:
you are not at home here.
We need to believe in the fall from Eden.
But all along, we were the ones who cast out the world.
Who stripped it naked,
taught it good and evil,
and barricaded ourselves in a walled garden.
We couldn't handle the true state of nature—
the overwhelming chaos—
without first dividing it up into little boxes,
in little gardens.
Maybe we were wrong from the start.
In the beginning,
there was everything.