Mind States – September 2007
The Nature Of Cities
by Jesse Wolf Hardin
The place where I live and teach is as far from a substantial urban center as one can ge
t in the lower 48 states. It is located seven river crossings and 300 miles from mid-sized Tucson. The county where our wilderness sanctuary is located is 98 percent federal and state forest, with fewer residents than the L.A. apartment complex I lived in as a child.
When I moved away in my teens, it was not necessarily to escape the city as such. For the ten years that I lived on the road, I greatly enjoyed and benefited from my time in the Hispanic barrios of Southern California, the cultural flowering of Santa Cruz and the bustle of San Francisco. If I was trying to leave anything behind, it wasn’t the pulse and fervor of culture but rather the antiseptic sameness of the suburb––the replacing of vintage buildings and tree-lined lanes with indistinguishable strip malls and the glaring absence of Mother Nature.
At this time, roughly one-half of the world’s population — over 75 percent of the populations of Europe and North and South America––live in cities of 25,000 or more. Today one finds an uninterrupted urban environ from D.C. to Boston and from San Diego to Mendocino. On a global level as well, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell these various leviathans apart. The problem begins when a contemporary human-made environment reflects little but itself in its mirrored windows and high-rise office buildings. Both local human and natural history are too often ignored, quashed or consigned to museums, zoos or books in the face of the urban machine.
Cities are meant to be repositories and generators of art and sensibility, places ripe with the opportunities for commerce and the sharing of ideas. The task for most of us is not to leave the cities behind but to work to improve their livability and to take responsibility for their condition. We can do this through the artful homes we build and the old places we preserve and restore, through an understanding of what came before, and through a continued honoring of a place’s intrinsic feel and flavor. On a hands-on level, this can be attained by the creation of walking bicycle trails and mass transit, the organized protection of grandmother trees threatened by road improvements, and the planting of native saplings, wildflowers and other indigenous plants. Other actions include parking vehicles underground, organizing back-lot community gardens, establishing laws that ensure “open space“ and reducing the dependence on imported food and goods.
The roofs of every high-rise can be host to vegetable beds, birdhouses and rain-catchment containers. Every concrete median strip could be converted into a mid-street planter box. It’s easy to imagine rivers once forced underground being given back their natural courses and allowed to flow cleanly between shops and homes. Houses can be retrofitted for solar heat gain and, in some cases, connected to each other by greenhouses and shared community space. Structures with history and character can be restored and retrofitted rather than torn down. Neighborhoods can organize around fun celebrations as well as creative work parties. Individuals and families can become alliances of friends who are in common cause with all members of the environment in which they live. Through these actions, we can come to see how “sustainable development” is a matter of personal and collective spiritual growth rather than material accumulation. We might also remain in the city not just out of convenience or circumstance, but also out of a commitment to nourish and aid the community in which we live.
In the city, as much as anywhere, a renewed sense of belonging can heal the wounds of separateness and rootlessness. It is to this point that conditions call for the greatest awareness. The more a slice of sky is blocked by buildings or obliterated by bright, night-time lights, the more our attention needs to be on the arc of the sun and the appearance of the moon in its particular phases each night. The more that concrete and asphalt cover the Earth, the more important is our contact with the bare soil of a small garden or the grassy lawn of a community park. Where the wildlife has been largely extirpated, we’re called on to notice the wild birds nesting in the eaves of the library building and to differentiate between the native trees and those that were introduced to the grounds of the nearby university campus.
Noticing and appreciating becomes a manifestation of our deepening values and evolving purpose… and an expression of the nature of our cities, our homes and our lives.
Jesse Wolf Hardin is an acclaimed author and teacher of Animá earth-centered practice. He and his partners offer Shaman and Medicine Woman correspondence courses as well as host retreats, vision quests and internships in an ancient place of power. Events held in their S.W. river canyon include the Sister Spirit Retreat, Sept. 27-30. Animá Wilderness Retreat Center, Box 688, Reserve, NM 87830.
www.animacenter.org.