Some snapshots highlight a nearly three-mile stroll this morning in the first sunshine we've seen for a while here in the Sunshine State.
While it's hard to love the busy road of Gulf Beach Highway, I do enjoy the side roads along the water. And I always relish paying attention to the plants, birds, sounds and smells.
One particular neighborhood is quite old for this location and has pronounced stretches of homes in “disrepair.” This section is right on the water, meaning the property is of significant value. There's an odd pleasure for me that these homes haven't been renovated and even that some of them are falling in a little. There are still people living there presumably enjoying their waterfront lives in what I consider a “fixer upper” (that I would love to get my hands on). Hardly the grand homes that everyone seems to build these days, there's something comforting about an average-size little home from the past with such a view. These properties are also a harbor to lots of vegetation and wildlife you aren't going to find in scathing new developments.
There's one stroll I take where nearly every home seems like it is almost abandoned. But looking closer… what I'm seeing is actually a coop of chickens in foreground of that nailed-shut front door.
You can't group all of these houses together. Some are being carelessly left unattended with belongings strewn all about that could be taken away in the first storm. There are even some homes along my walk that are still in the same state they were in the day after Sally hit in 2020. One could imagine 100 scenarios involving lack of resources and 100 more involving the ownership of too many homes and being stretched too thin.
What is strange is that there are *so many* homes like this along this waterfront, supposedly of so much value. I also notice people living there and going about life as normal. It's expensive to live. We take what we can get, I imagine them adding. Out their front window is a giant expanse of the lagoon and the gulf beyond it if you are high enough up on the road’s crest. There are about four or five homes at elevation enough to enjoy this incredible luxury of seeing past the barrier island out into the beautiful sea.
This is a stroll through yesteryear Florida - 1950s, 60s and 70s homes with cute and perhaps quirky little gates that are no longer functioning with owl statues on each gatepost. Who doesn't love this?
I wish I could go back and take pictures of all the eccentricities and accumulations around some of these homes but I don't want to be disrespectful, so you'll have to use imagination with the falling apart part. It's sad to imagine anyone thinking I'm stalking their home planning to offer a low-ball purchase when I'm more interested in the dying and coming to life all around: the dying of structure and expectation amid the wilding of the environment that is most of this stretch in the neighborhood. It smells different. I can smell complex scents of multiple types of shiny leaves baking in the sun and herbs growing in the sand.
There was a delicious Camellia dropping their dressy magenta robes on the ground like an invitation to come worship at an altar, and also this lovely little purple flower everywhere that looks so much like a Trillium.
Turns out it's Smooth Spiderwort. Both Camellia and Spiderwort have numerous medicinal qualities. I wouldn't have seen all the lovely little purple flowers if people were mowing and taming their surroundings.
While I'm walking this morning, staring out at the beautiful lagoon with a giant barge moving along at about my pace, I'm also thinking how the systems we've created in our society and the structures that we've relied on are falling down around us. We might look quite messy in those structures right now ourselves.
How could we not? We're trying to learn boundaries to take care of our health and well-being when others haven't cared for us well but we're also trying to learn how to uncancel an un-ghost people and have hard conversations.
The very nature of bugging out on humanity leads us to a more egoic process. Our systems are not created to embrace mistakes or confusion or hurt, because they are based on a trickle- down transactional model. For example, a church denomination might suggest that I ordain you and credential you for service, and you behave a certain way so you make me look organizationally solid. You bring more people into this system and we keep growing and everybody behaves. If you stop making me look good by doing and saying all the right things and behaving a certain way you put me at risk, and I kick you out and we move on.
But who's going to learn something new in that situation? Why are our faith based and community systems not built to help integrate the real learning of life? We're afraid of compost. We're afraid of rewilding. We aren't taking the time to recycle. We aren't creating sustainable relationship systems. We're afraid of what we might learn and what we might lose in the process but we're losing our opportunity to grow together into a beautiful future. Clearly there are firm lines we must set, but we don't seem to have a sense of things right now for all the rest. And reactionism has run rampant in many types of spaces.
My favorite house is pictured below. It's a '60s era home as cute as a button with a view of the water. It's not falling to pieces because people stuck with it and without using a whole bunch of new resources they blended the house with the environment. It was apparently not more than anyone could handle. But even if it were falling to pieces and everyone inside it were disenchanted or unable to keep it up we would still see the earth grow in and surround someone's fading dream.
There's a point at which we must move on sometimes from any given arrangement but maybe we consciously do so. We spread out the threads carefully and untangle them. We see what we learn together in our transition. Conscious uncoupling is an example of this. Taking a system or structure (marriage) and pulling it apart lovingly and thoughtfully so that the transition composts and creates new life and maybe even a better new relationship.
In truth, we don't have to figure this all out. Beauty will claim back what we can't make sense of or what we ruin. Beauty in all of its wildness will come slowly in to take back what we can't allow to be intentionally wild.
Within reasonable limits of preventing devastating harm, we need to be wilder in community. We need to be willing to let wildness breach our walls and our humanity and learn from our edges to grow sustainably into the human environment around us, not at odds with it.
In these last few months our community has been learning and growing without letting the wildness disappear. It's amazing what happens and the fruitfulness that occurs when ongoing conversation stays ongoing, even when it's hard. No one shutting it down. No one is trying to “look good for growth” but just letting the self-fertilizing process happen.
Then maybe we look… and right over there where we didn't expect it is some beautiful soul medicine popping up where we left off last… like a flower full of radiance and purpose.