I called in sick to work today. Sometimes you can feel the wires coming loose in your brain and rather than complete a work order, spend the entire day in the repair clinic, you can just go out to the old waterworks at Mason Mill or else Hahn Woods. You can walk the trails, and it’s fine to see the pipes and rusty sparring of old bridges being reclaimed by the dirt and foliage. And there’s the sound of rushing water as it blends with the traffic going over the bridge overhead. I am fond of the faded graffiti found in these places too. It reminds me that we never really came all that far from cave painting.
It’s not quite the same as a full brain flush and re-wire, these little visits, but the chemistry is momentarily balanced all the same. Sometimes we need to be reclaimed by nature. To feel the easy struggle of life prior to the complexities humans added to it. I am especially drawn to this in places where some small part of humanity – pipes and bridges – are themselves being reclaimed.
Granted, I like my GPS for when I become lost too long, and I can maintain my status on social media, even in this place. We’re never too far removed. But ever since they learned to recreate individual brain patterns in binary, store and run the negative and positive charges of experience in hard drives, and immortality became a reality, I’ve been a little skeptical of the whole concept of an afterlife. It takes some wandering in the ever-living woods and ultimately coming across a shaky suspension bridge over the creek to realize: there is no life after death. In fact, there is no death. Heaven, life, is here, now, always.
A preserve.
