querencia

Sun 10.17.21

These are dark times in America, and much of the world for human beings  As the long reigning power of our planet is finding its power challenged, it reacts inapropriatly.  It has lost its querencia.  What is querencia?  It is a Spanish word that describes the homing instinct, a word associated with the bullfight.  In the course of this mighty battle, the bull realizing that it is in trouble, makes its stand, choses his area, his querencia, his home, and there he will defend his chosen place to the death.  The bullfighter understands that only one of them will leave the ring at afternoon’s end once he sees that the bull has chosen his querencia.

Governments run the gamut.  At one time it was believed that America had found the solution; its people had rights long denied to others in the old world.  Is that true?  Was it ever true?  Oh my America, my new found land, my empirie, said John Donne to his mistress going to bed. 

Yes! Americans in their new found land were free.  There were great expanses for the taking, one’s own querencia where the rifle was one’s god-given law, mostly.  A people with little need of government as our foreparents were, would find our system truly oppressive.  But possessing one’s home and source of nourishment is not the solution to good government, to freedom.  I have lived in a world class city and in small towns, and I find small towns with land to be acquired and lived on to be much more repressive.  Yet I am a person of the land and truly cherished my backyard in New York

America’s great freedom lessened with each new settlement.  As the population expanded so did the rules, regulations and laws governing what was possible and permitted.  What’s to become of us?  I look at the image of my majestic tiger pinned on my corkboard and see in its powerful and beautiful stance what is deeply buried in each human being’s heart.  It may be denied, crushed, subverted, but will not be eradicated. 

Some believe that if there were fewer of us, Bill Gates for one, and the World Economic Forum, that we could reclaim our lost empirie.  I doubt that.  We can’t return to simpler times, having travelled too long on this road to turn back.  More and more, since the advent of technology, human beings are made aware of the profusion of opinions, beliefs, images, dogma.  Most understand the machinations of governments, their societies, and their dissolute pontifications.  We truly can no longer return to a past long since abandoned. 

Where is home now?  Where is the place where our buried tiger is able to roam at will free and proud?  This is what must be resolved, was always at the core.  How to expand the mind?  The great resetters, the corporations may achieve their desired aims of a smaller human footprint, but they may not like what they’ve wished for.

The favorite post this month has been the podcast, Luhrenloup’s Path