Our lost cities

Human civilisation stretches further and further, again and again, well beyond it's means. How can we create a stronger and stabler base for our human lives, and for all life on Earth?

In launching Stronger Ground, I am reminded of one of my favourite stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love it so much I feel loathe to let you past these gates without having a read. http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/crackup/068e-city.htm. Go on then!

It sings, sadly, of the idea that the city, its structures, its conventions, its drives and drivers, although rich and beautiful in their brash way, can't be upheld at present, without losing a fundamental part of ourselves: our deeper connection to ourselves and the rest of life, nature.

Through losing this connection, we’ve separated ourselves from full conscience over the necessary exploitation, loss of life, or environmental morass it takes to uphold the city we live in. We’ve also divorced ourselves from our true senses of self through a failure to fit neatly into the civilised human machine’s cogs and wheels, or a tendency to fit too well. The deeper joy, significance, contribution and meaning of life that fits beyond civilisation and capitalism’s definitions. The simple understanding of the places where the world we create has no real foundation.

Our lost cities are often shining, bright, and beautiful entities. Much loved castles on the sand, stretching out to dazzling or oppressive heights - which depending largely on your station in it. Metropolis after metropolis living doubly, triply past it's means. Devoid of real and lasting equilibrium.

One of my goals through Stronger Ground’s events, media and analysis is to explore the dimensions of this lost space most of humanity finds ourselves inhabiting. Where the cracks in the pavement form, but also where real or potential strengths lie.

Especially the latter space. For as much as Fitzgerald’s story is a diagnostic or a memorium, a mourning record of the beautiful but feral, the supine, the sick, I want to tease out, celebrate and foster the lovely, wholesome and well. Salvaging the warped threads that are left, weaving them right.

Returning back to Fitzgerald's final cry:

"So perhaps I am destined to return some day and find in the city new experiences that so far I have only read about. For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O' glittering and white!"

Perhaps this glow can be revisited through working steadily on shedding the glimmering illusions of the world and contributing to a reality with an even brighter shine.