Inner landscape

An awful lot of urban planning, particularly in poor areas, has doubly impoverished the population by the ugliness which surrounds them. And it’s understandable that it is so difficult to reach and sustain gentleness in these places. And I do think, like, a friend of mine, just in the last week, who was absolutely exhausted in NYC, just went away to southern Maine and spent the week by the slow ocean and she’s totally recovered, you know, come back to herself.

Though it’s not simply a matter of the outer presence of the landscape. I mean, the dawn goes up and the twilight comes down even in the roughest inner-city place. And I think that connecting to the elemental can be a way of coming into rhythm with the universe that’s here. And I do think that there is a way in which the outer presence — often in my case through memory or imagination — can be brought inward as a sustaining thing. I mean, I know that as I am writing, that there are individuals holding out on frontlines, holding the humane tissue alive in areas of ultimate barbarity, where things are visible that the human eye should never see. And they are able to sustain it, because there is in them some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we are really called to in some way. I love Pascal’s phrase, you know, that you should always “keep something beautiful in your mind.” And I have often — like in times when it’s been really difficult for me — if you can keep some kind of contour that you can glimpse sideways at now and again, you can endure great bleakness.

~ by Natalie on 13 March.