A Final Hoorah with READING LANDSCAPES: WRITING NATURE IN THE 21st CENTURY

And thus 6 weeks of summer work: 200+ youth and 30+ teachers comes to a close. We finished with a workshop on Google 360 and learning how to set up our iPhones as virtual goggles to see a panorama of our nature experiences. It was wonderful, but surreal. I was able to travel all around the world and view the 1/2 dome as if I was in that location (including standing in Cicero or getting off the train in Roskilde, Denmark. 

Bottom line, we can capture everything in a virtual world, but it doesn't mean the world is sustained or felt. There's beauty in the technology and I love every second of it, but we fail to recognize the humanity of it all. 

Prompted to reflect on the experience (in a very short time), I went poetic. Reading Landscapes: Writing Nature in the 21st Century - this was a little Total Recall for me, where nature is best experienced on a screen. 

Virtually Real, Really Virtual

We are a blur,

hypnotically captured in a shoebox

of yesterday’s photographs, 

specters and spooks 

in the crevices and nooks 

of history.

Waves don’t roll,

rivers don’t run.

Friends and family are partially etched

in disappearing time.

Thoughts are circular,

molecular, but only half

the dome is roamed….

the lines disconnect the real

from what we virtually hope is truth.

A google of geese

are frozen shadows across blue sky…

a façade of wings 

flying through a simulacra of migration.

Church congregations 

sit stills

with frozen prayers 

never to be heard.

Clouds become

time-capsules

trapped in a culture of voyeurism.

The virtue

of morally bankrupt

dehumanization

is the antonym

of what it means to be alive.