by Iris Forester

Created on: November 21, 2008   Last Updated: January 28, 2009

Having turned in my electronic ID badge, and cleaned out my cubicle at the Housing Authority Central Office, I now find myself becalmed in the middle of a weekday morning watching the small movements of alder leaves in the rain. My recent leap from life as an inner-city social worker to that of rural artisan and homesteader means that country living, and the reasons for it, are squarely in the center of my thoughts.

I have a fondness for cities, and a respect for the crucial functions they serve. A nation and a culture need their urban areas, and world-class cities offer the best testimony, the furthest articulation, of what human beings are capable of creating. There's nothing in the countryside that could replace the experience of being out in the streets, singing and dancing with thousands of strangers on the night Barack Obama was elected president. Being in a city reminds us that we belong to history, that we participate in the humming global network of human progress.

However, living in the country reminds us that we belong to something as well; it's a more intimate sense of belonging, in a web which is more primal and more immediate. Your place in the sweep of history may be far from your thoughts as you hike up a quiet trail in the woods, but your membership in basic animal nature will be evident with every breath.

In the city, where the landscape in all directions is manufactured and constructed, it's easy to fall prey to an inflated sense of humanity's role in the world. Gazing out from the 25th floor of a downtown office building, or even from the soft front seat of your car at a multi-lane intersection, you can't help but be lured into an illusion that nature has been tamed. If it's a stormy day, you're likely to be in a climate-controlled environment, and events outside the window are about as relevant to you as your screen saver.

When you encounter the land on its own terms, unconquered by the planning, rectifying and designing of human beings, you are humbled. The soil is heavy and wet, the freezing rain formidable, the sheer weight of a falling branch something you have to take into account. When you stand at the base of a tree looking for the right place to set the chainsaw bar, your own vulnerability is all too obvious. The distance from sources of emergency aid is equally humbling. It reminds you that we don't after all have every square inch of life insured, that there are no guarantees, that risk is part of being alive. You live face to face

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