Wilderness Lost! Sins' Decommissioned Subway Car.

The epic sadness that comes from contemplation of wilderness lost is not as great as the encounter itself. Melancholy says you can never measure up. You cannot measure wilderness at all. Its boundaries beyond comprehension, scale. What it does to the senses is so exhilarating that we give up our lives for it even while we perversely tear it down in word and deed. Nineteenth century explorers and farmers considered all fellow inhabitants of the wilderness vermin, whether fox or eagle, bear or native, to be exterminated.

This is the wilderness of the test,  where Paul went to the backside desert, Israel wandered 40 years, Jesus went on the mountain to give solitude from civilization. That book of Isms of the 20th century examined those harmful effects of civilization with benefits and viola, civilization is treated the same as wilderness, loved/hated, sought and fled. When the scapegoat is driven out of civilization, where does it go, where does it take our sins and crimes? Into the wilderness. We're not supposed to use that word sin, but where did sins come from but the civil, the psyche, the man. Where do they go? They pass out into the world, the ocean, the mountain, the desert, the river, the forest glade.

What happens to them there? We don't hear  anymore. Like decommissioned NYC subway cars, stripped and sunk to the bottom of the sea to oxidize and rust into nothing, turned back to the elements, it is an alchemy, but they do not become the elements they were.  Take the spirit, materialize it, purge it and bury it. This is the course of life the civil follows. Send it into the wilderness.

Why the elders were silent

while

earth

burned

around them?

It was the fire in the tub.

Over

them,

in them,

rub a dub dub.