And then it was that I turned onto Old Chattanooga Pike SW, and was immediately greeted by a phenomenal bank of undulating (and horizon-blending) kudzu …

“Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest — the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways – and re-enter the wilder neighborhoods of Nature herself. For only there can we encounter the silence and the awe of our own status as mere visitors here. Only in this silence and awe can we recover the sense of our world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without us, of our innate inferiority to it and indeed our dependence upon it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and felt that Oneness, we will grow humble before the place and finally begin to truly take it in – to learn from it what it truly is – to care for it in the ways it more than deserves. As its sounds come into our hearing, and its lights and colors come into our vision, and its odors come into our nostrils, only then we may come into its presence as we never have before, and will arrive in our proper place as servants to its beauty, and there ever desire to humbly remain. It is then and then alone that our lives will grow out of the ground like all the other lives of the place, and it is then that we will take our proper place alongside them. We will be with them as equals – neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor seeking to abuse or dominate them in any way. And so at last we will grow to be truly worthy of the title of Native-Born. So it is that we must we all reenter the silence and the awe, and thereby be finally & truly Born Again.” ~ inspired by Wendell Berry

Filed under: Peace Pilgrimage #02: Walking HOME (2019) by Scaughdt