Private land is not land. To illustrate that, here’s some private property, degraded from a grassland supporting a few hundred people to a weed land for about three cows, for about three weeks. Yet, it is socially very valuable, to one man.

Let’s look more closely. Here’s the land. As you can see, to a human it’s about a road. This road, a line of will, leads into the land, where it becomes diffuse. Beautiful.

When this land is considered in its entirety, though, you can see how human perception, and the road which represents it, leads to a horizon, not to the land. It is a boundary. There everything changes.

At that point, the body stops representing itself as the land but represents itself as potential, energy, and a limitless future.

It’s a trick of human intelligence. It creates a human narrative — ownership, or social posturing — out of unity.

In this way, humans become aware of themselves. “To be or not to be,” said Hamlet, in a tragedy that was really a love story, in which the lovers, Hamlet, a gloomy sort, and Ophelia, another gloomy sort, were gloomy because they were separated. The separation led to high drama and tragedy (and to Hamlet usurping Ophelia’s story, sigh, which led to her death —logically, as she had been turned into nature)…

The thing is, she isn’t, and neither is this:

It is an act of separation, which creates drama. The problem with drama — and separation — is that the lovers die.

Wouldn’t it be better if we helped them? No more To Be or Not to Be, for one thing. Love,  “land” and identity are not “not being” or “being” or any combination of them. Those are tricks of language and consciousness that divide earth from sky. Christ suggested that we bring them together. Then we brought him down.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Descent from the Cross, 1616

The point was not the separation of body from spirit, but the union of sky and earth, potential and realization, self and other, right here, in every moment. That is not a narrative. That is consciousness. Selling consciousness, or Christ, or Ophelia, as a view is Hamlet’s problem.

We could at least try to not make it ours.