Is it not fascinating that the very nature I have adored since birth, which, indeed, we may say is the substrate in which my existence is embedded and that from which I emerge is an actual, existing paradise, right near me. And one which, consistently, throughout my entire life, I have been viciously and systematically denied. By an idea. My life and love were and are consistently obliterated by a single idea.

The idea of ownership. Particularly, however, ownership of place.

You see, although I was born on this land, I have no share of it. Ever. In fact, there is nowhere I can go to simply be. I am, actually, a fugitive here, unless I go to prison. The reason is that wherever I may go, a strange kind of consensus-being will eject, demean, charge, or attack me, claiming ownership or protectorship of place or passage. This includes the place I was conceived. The place I was born. Every place I have ever set my foot, and the place I will die. Even after I die, I will have no home, for I will be denied membership in the community of beings who are “allowed” to occupy space as their own, just as I have been throughout my lifetime.

Why must I be allowed to occupy space? Who, really, has the right to do this?

I am homeless and placeless in the deepest sense of the world. There is no place for me at all.

At best, I am ‘tolerated’ based upon some form of direct exchange of resources or monies (and my personhood) for the ‘privilege’ of occupying some modest place which I may still be removed from at the whim of some bizarre consensus-body or other.

Why would we believe that children could exist in health without places to exist? Why would we believe adults could even -be human- without -places in which to discover, understand, and nurture this-?

But more confusing is the hellish cruelty of the existence of nature, all around me, but endlessly denied me. I am allowed to ‘visit’ it, for fees, like a prison inmate.

I will actually live and die in adoration with a visionary wonderment to astonishing to describe that exists just beyond my capacity to reach: a vision of living intimacies with living places I have not yet and shall never enjoy, because I refuse to own them, and if I will not own or pay… then I shall have no place there.

So this life, for me, and many like me, will be a strange one indeed. A life where I fell in love with and adored a nature I lived in almost absolute division from. Because of ideas that are as deadly as they are stupid. A distant paradise so near and at the same time untouchable as to comprise a tragic injury, and an ironic paradox. Born in paradise, only to be denied it. Only to watch one’s people tear it apart, lie about it, and sell the remains.

We are not human who are not freely intimate with all living places. If we have not this, nothing we can purchase will amend this cruel and forever self-magnifying impoverishment, and nothing we can pretend will make us human. What we will be I do not know; but it is unworthy of our lives, our hearts, and our births.