Wandering around the city, passing the financial district, I am suddenly aware 0f how closed in I feel. The invisible walls close in around me like a scene from a movie from which I must escape. My chest tightens and the claustrophobic air suffocating. Others walk around blindly with their heads in their mobile phones or holding a take away coffee from some global company. I look for some trees but the only ones I see are like standing twigs, as naked due to winter. I feel all is spinning and shaking around me as all at once it hits me what a world I am truly living in. Tears fall from my face as I fall to my knees and I realise there is no way to really ever escape from it all.
More and more we’re choosing to living in cities, far from the nature as more things to do and easier to get to/from work. The title of a British television show “Escape to the country” flurries through my mind; it is like escaping from these concrete cages that we call cities, trapping us in like we have already to other animals in the name of food from chickens to cows. Fracking I can only see degrading our beautiful countryside, so the only option left is to be like the cows that no longer chew on the fresh green fields but forced to live in these concrete mega cities like the mega dairies I campaigned against coming to the United Kingdom only a few years ago now.
I realise that within a few of generations we will not know the ways of nature, it will be something grandparents talk of till nobody left ever remembers them at all. I recall meeting a man of twenty five from London that had never saw a sheep till the day we met, it hits me twice as hard remembering it. Gradually more and more conversation is dying, people reach for “friends” that live inside the goods they have bought and showing off with “look at me”. This leads to people wanting more and more, but cannot afford, and feel the world owes them. Food prices will increase too and people will end up fighting like I saw on images from Black Friday over manufactured food.
I resolve to spend as much time as I can with the world outside the city walls. Where I can climb hills to see it all, listen to the songs of birds, admire the beauty of the flowers that mark my path and know there is something else out there beyond the cages. I wonder if this is what it is like to finally wake from the sleep beyond the endless sleeps, as how do I know I am truly awake? Like an onion the more I peel back to try find the ultimate answer, but like Dorothy I find the wizard is no more than a fraud. Suddenly, I notice an evergreen tree in my line of sight, I do not care who sees me now, as I run up and hug him like an old friend and whisper to him “thank you, always”.
© Fi S. J. Brown
Tea and Ponders 