this time ~ this space

I was moved by Jon Piasecki’s The Nature of Walls: Why we build them, how they fail us in the January/February edition of Orion.

Piasecki is a landscape architect and stonemason for his company, Golden Bough, in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

… A wall designed to keep something out has to restrict whomever it is protecting within its confines. While it seems a success that nothing can breach the walls and give threat, in the end the walls will fall—and in the meantime their standing creates a deadly problem: people held within the walls are trapped with whatever internal threats the walls contain.

If nature’s story were to have a brief synopsis it would be this: life, cataclysm, survival, adaptation, and regeneration. The natural world and evolution have a robust and proven track record of several billion years. Humanity, in contrast, is new and frail, and our many cultures are just a tiny part of this brief human history. The modern defensive walls we have set against nature—be they engineered, medical, military, or religious—seem designed more to maintain the illusion that we are in control and in a privileged position than to resolve the underlying tension of our own insignificance and our inevitable failure to overcome death. -> Read the full article