The Boundary

Todoroki Waterfalls

Many many years ago I took jujitsu lessons (never got past yellow belt.) When I first was introduced to my new sensei, he led me to the dojo which was actually in his back yard. There was a torii over the gate to the area where the dojo was, and a little tiny pond and I seem to recall some bamboo around the periphery. A torii is a gate in Shinto practice that demarcates sacred space. Anyway, he told me that once I passed under the torii, I was no longer in the United States but was actually in Japan, a tiny piece of it anyway. As strange a statement as that seems, I very quickly took it as a matter of fact. The area of the dojo was no longer "normal space" for me, it was some other space, in some strange way perhaps connected to the actual Japan. 

My old sensei once said that the kami of that special space, the local spirit of the tiny dojo itself, took a liking to me which he considered an atypical reaction. I am sorry now that I never got to pour a sake for the kami of that place.

Anyway, what made me think of this was that I was walking to a nearby green space which was apparently named (by a local graffiti artist) Piper's Hollow. Now Yellowstone or Olympic National Park, Piper's Hollow is not. It's a bit of greenery surrounding a drainage ditch alongside an old folks home and some apartment complexes. It drains all the suburban yards of the locality into the Jackson Branch of White Rock Creek, a fingerlike extension of the parkland surrounding White Rock Lake. Trains from the local light rail transit system regularly rattle along a bridge over the ditch. It is hard to imagine a more humble fragment of forest that could still be called a forest.

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And yet, the instant I crossed the street and set foot on the path that led away from the suburban houses and down into the drainage ditch, I immediately felt as if some invisible weight or other had been lifted from my body. As if I were escaping from hostile lands and had crossed the frontier into my own homeland. Even the trees arched over the pathway as if to accent that border, like a sort of torii. If a place could smile, Piper's Hollow was smiling at me.

And yet I have lived in this neighborhood most of my life, why should the suburbs next to the forest be any less "home" to me? Clearly I felt they were.

The suburbs are overtly dedicated to human use, if there is anything wild there (and there is), it exists in the margins of human control. The little plants growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk, the raccoons and opossums that come out at night, are the only inroads of the wild into a carefully manicured and very demarcated space. A space dominated by human property ownership for human uses. It is therefore inherently unfree space. Even your own house, the front yard certainly and also to some extent the back yard is unfree space: it is subject in almost all cases to all kinds human regulation. Let your front yard grow wild, and you will see very quickly that it isn't really yours as the neighbors and the City weigh in. The externals of the house itself is unfree space. It is only in spaces that humans have no use for, or which have been overtly marked as a public land of some kind, that you enter nonhuman wild space, which is the only really free space. It is the only space in which humans enter their right relation to the world, which is as one being of many, not more privileged than any other being.

Few things can repel my soul like human civilized spaces can. You never even realize the stagnant atmosphere you are breathing until you leave. The big box stores are deserts, in which no living thing other than people and their things are. Even if there are plants for sale, they look unhappy to be there. Some people live their entire lives in this civilized space, never once knowing wildness. I can hardly imagine anything sadder. The boundary between the wild and the civilized is the boundary between the free and the enslaved. There must be places in the world where humans are put back in their box, both for their own sake and the sake of the world. For their own sake because they will never know the sacred until they are willing to stop putting humans at the top of the pecking order, with all other things falling in line with human desires and expectations. If you want to speak of ownership, as humans are wont to do, then you do not own the world. The world owns you.

Would that humans were put back in their boxes all over the world.