the outlet could be the soil

One Saturday afternoon, as I was swaying in my hammock I began to listen to my community, Eye of the Water, as it drifted past on the wind. A gust of the mountain air approaches from a distance. The leaves of various trees begin to tremble like tumbling dominoes in a flurry of excitment until finally i feel the fresh soft pressure on my face. As this happens, I hear a banana leaf scraping against the tin roof above my head; like a talon slowly carving the word connectivity into a dry chalkboard. I think of what the wind has said. A tree blowing in the wind makes contact with a mineral structure that has been mined, machined and hoisted into the air by man to serve as a shield against the forces of nature. Is the wind saying that if this tin roof weren´t there then the screeching noise would not have been made, that the intersection of natural existence and non-natural existence creates a hideous noise, a shriek of transformation. Or, as I think to myself, the banana leaf and the tin roof are co-existing and the only side effect, it seems, is a rather unpleasant noise which is considerably less unpleasant than not having a roof over one´s head or banana´s to eat. The thick rustle of leaves dies down and the banana tree comes to a silent stoic rest. My hammock stops its gentle sway, but only for a moment.

The dominoes fall again signaling a new gust of the wise old wind. This time, the wind carries with it the unmistakable sound of a sharpened blade slicing through the living fibers of a hearty grass. Someone nearby must be cleaning their vegtable garden. Perhaps, a farmer is cutting down the underbrush so his crops may have the space, air, water, sun, and nutrients necessary for continued growth. The iron blade of the farmers machete is forged in the furnace of reason. The machete is a tool that helps the cultivater manage his crop. Without this tool, planting and harvesting the crop would be more difficult for the farmer. The machete is a tool of subsistence. Of course, this farmer has the natural impulse to survive. And the farmer is cutting the ¨natural¨ growth for the natural desire to survive with the natural blade of reason. What is the wind getting at here? Is the sound of the farmer cutting the weeds, this connectivity, natural? Is this farmers more closely in-touch with nature than the unattended banana leaf scraping against the tin roof?

As the farmer cuts the last of the bad grass down a piercing, pounding ¨bam, bam, bam¨ echoes throughout the valley. The thunderous noise repeats with classic frequency and everyone knows this sound. I imagine that somewhere in the valley, a man is holding the wooden handle of an iron hammer. With great accuracy and forethought, the man aims the hammer at the head of an iron nail. Bam! Bam! Bam! The nail wedges its way into the sculpted carcass of an old dead tree. The tree has arrived at its final resting place where it will stand as an epitaph to the resiliance and usefulness of nature until nature itself molds the board into soil where another tree might grow. The sound is at once beautiful and tragic. It is beautiful that the raw resources given by nature are able to be molded by man in such a way as to make our modern world possible. But also, the tragic death of natural existence as the man uses an iron hammer to fasten an iron nail into a board, as another man uses an iron saw to sculpt a fallowed tree into a board, as yet another uses an iron axe to cut down the mighty tree. The wind has spoken and so has the carpenter. The death of natural existence, I begin to think, may originate in the unrestrained use of reason to shape our modern world. Did man drive the nail of reason into the coffin of natural existence?

These were my thoughts that saturday afternoon.

The very next day I read this in ¨The Epic of Latin America¨, ¨Man has cut himself from the tree of natural existence with the saw of reason.¨ This archeologists quote is terribly vague and, without context, deliriously overstated. However, the timing leads me to believe that I am on the right path of inquiry.