2017-03-19

Exhale and inhale'"


Imagine that you are standing outside a climate shell in the middle of a beautiful forrest clearing. The trees go on for kilometers in each direction but you're right where you should be. This is not at the far edge of civilisation, just  one of the unheard vanilla edges, one of the don't-care-edges. Well, actually it's just close to the edge. ...on the undomesticated side of the border. The house lets nature through it, in every aspect of the word, but you are standing next to the electric car instead of being within the shell. You wouldn't be protected indoors anyway.

Tears are running down you face and they glitter in the intense radiation of the summer sun. And they keep coming, like rain that falls inside you and pour down your soul only to drain through your eyes.

You can see yourself from an above drone perspective. The top of the head and your shoulders slowly drift away as the view expands. Like the drone that isn't there lifts off into the sky. The the car is an odd shade of pale white, except the windshield, of course. After all, this is your car and you like driving. Why would the lack of fossil fuel stop you?

The clearing floats away and the view fills with trees. Deep green pines and spruces with the occasional birchtree. Or you could be imagining things. It could be african giants or sequoia or camphor. Your house is usually surrounded by familiar trees. Soft wood. It could be painted metal foil for all you know.

The lush green ends by the blue and the grey, a big lake with clear water on one side and something more concrete on the other. More than a hamlet or a village, more than a borough or a town. Urbanite crushes the forrest as the water does from an opposite direction. Yet the road to your house is several kilometers from the nearest shore or town. The clearing is somewhere in there but from this distance your eyes simply fail you. Even raptors would have to squint.

As the sphere shape becomes more and more visible a silent question lingers on your lips like a whisper or a tiny gasp for air. Will you be able to breathe in space? Of course not. But you're not in space so there is no need for concern. No drone could fly here except for that roton (a device born from splicing helicopter DNA with rocketery) they secretely perfected in Arizona decades ago.

Yet, even though you know that this is just a trick of the mind, you exhale and wait for the lungs to fill again. A scent of hack and apple flowers in the breeze is the last thing you remember before you black out with a sigh.

- - -

It is a bit like that to be inside that house in the deep forrest. Nature seeps into your soul there like the air leaks out of a faulty flight suit. Nature lives more within that house than outside it, trust me. If Paradise could have been saved inside a building then that house could be such a place.

And yet you're crying outside it.