FENCES IN THE HEAD

What does it mean, bottom line, to be from a country? Even more bottomly, what does it mean to be from a planet? Wherever you were born, wherever you grew up - your “home” country - is but an atom on a mote on this dust-speck in the cosmos we designate by a primal breathsound "erth," our only home so far, excluding asteroid transport to our fledgling lifeless planet of enzyme building blocks, at which timepoint we anyway had no opinion as to the all of it all. Ultimately, though, because of us and our inner horizons, that dust-speck holds profound meaning for the entire cosmos, even if we are alone.

For my small part, while I’m here and moving around I try not to be misguided or feel controlled by passports, visas, borders, boundaries etc., which are after all virtual fences designed to keep others out, which would be bad enough in a happy society (the hopeful fruit of evolution), but even worse, in our currently diverse societies they’re often serving to keep us in.

Whether we know it or not, or even think about it, we transcend territory by an infinite range, yet still we have fences and borders. We abstract them into the skies and into the sea and earth, as well as in the South and North Poles, and beyond even those dimensions we carry ancient, locally built stone fences in our heads.

Seems impossibly distant, but one day, one day...