www.gerrietts.net

I love the natural world, by which I mean the areas of wilderness and preservation efforts where human development has not overrun the terrain. I can date this affinity back a long way, to high school at the latest, and probably earlier than that. I've felt a connection to natural processes, and a sort of admiration for the ideology I identify as Native American, this sort of living in harmony with nature and being an integral and respectful part of it. I don't think these ideas are especially uncommon, but they're also in a sort of tension for me.

I think I can start with Sartre, and Nausea. I don't remember whether it was the book itself, or whether it was discussion of the book, but I think that in my experience of that novel, and to some lesser extent, the Love & Rockets song "No New Tale to Tell", I came to see human endeavors as a sort of extension and re-figuring of nature, an expression of nature's impulses to grow, create, build hives. The city itself is like a colony of ants, people wrapped in visions of importance and hurrying from one place to the next. I have learned to enjoy looking at a thing, or a place, or a person, and trying to understand what their aesthetic says about them, what it's aiming at, what they're trying to be and how close they are to hitting it.

I have become something of an admirer of the world, not just the parts where man has not been, but all parts. Yet, I so rarely go out in it, and almost never alone. Why is that?