Exit Macclenny

Well, our amazing summer travels turned into reversing back to Miami to work on a large project with the City of Miami.

We are proposing a Sustainable Urban Arts Center and are scouting county land for the project.

We are driving down the county roads, making a stop to a exotic Florida spring and I can't help this fear that arises from my belly when we drive through this part of the State.

There is the Florida State Hospital, a huge prison, a correctional facility and pretty much nothing but trailers for the residents of this area. The grass is perfectly manicured, as all the prisoners are constantly maintaining it, they all speak poorly of women, like to impose their authority aggressively and I find their persecutions, no different then those Muslim renegades who show their loyalty through stoning, suicide missions and the alike. None of them have perspective, none of them have choices.

I like this Thomas Jefferson quote: No people can be both ignorant and free.

I feel it is a little ironic and very apt to today's American culture.

The land is so green and laden with Spanish Moss, like grey hairs and stagnant air, a place that use to be rich in energy, a place that use to provide endless resources for people who knew how to listen to the land. Now the residents complain of the heat, the drought, the mosquitoes. But if the land was in harmony, if the rivers and ponds were full of fish, if bats and owls were in equal balance with the insects, but they are not, pesticides dropped from the sky kill a great deal of insects, the waters are polluted with pesticide down wash, over fished and even the architectural decision infringe on ones enjoyment of the land and dis-balances the ecology. For instance, Salt Springs State Park decided to frame their spring with a huge wall, thus cutting off the ecology of the earth and the animal and organisms that depended on the beach and transitional water land habitat. Also, Lake Okeechobee has a giant retention wall or hill that completely surrounds it, I suppose one year it flooded the land and devastated the local area and the military or government built the wall that stands today. Now the area is barren, stagnant and culturally frightening. No one uses this huge lake as a resource, it is just fished and perhaps to death.

It is like a reversion to the time of the puritans, those people who expressed so much fear of nature and believed the forests haunted, full of beasts and naked witches. Perhaps the contemporary fears are West Nile, poisonous spiders, snakes, flesh eating bacteria and naked witches.

I feel so desperate for a place free of television, movies, video games, fast food, processed food, pesticide food and negativity. A place that is soft and flowing with nature, a place to show my children the beauty of it all, how wonderful it can be, why we should protect life and what real wealth is.

If you know this place, please invite us.