I had a mix tape of Ryan Adams songs playing in the car while I drove around town today. I thought about how he used to be so much more down to earth in both his music and his public life. He’s kind of spiraled through the world of the famous and beautiful and it seems to have left him dizzy.
While I was listening to the music and enjoying the drive (for the first time in a while), I drove by a large chunk of property that had apparently sprouted a forest of “Auction” signs. It made me immediately angry because most of my town’s beauty has been entirely undermined and nearly destroyed by commerce and industry.
Then I had a thought of how our country (and maybe the rest of the world) has been so corrupted by money and consumerism. Men are busy trying to be God and women are trying to be Mother Nature, then selling and therefore forgetting what they’re trying to emulate. We’re busy recreating the world instead of living in it as it is. This is the root of everything that’s wrong with the world today. Money makes us buy and sell things that are no longer precious to us. We spend trillions of dollars every day trying to adapt the world to us as opposed adapting ourselves to the nature of the planet. And all this makes us lose contact with the ground and the very atmosphere.
What the hell happened? Why do we have this insatiable drive to become masters of everything. Why can no one be content with just being a student of everything? This lust for lordship has even infected those that would ordinarily bring us back to ourselves (like Ryan Adams). I shudder to think how much farther we can take ourselves from the basic joy of being a resident on the planet.
