stasis or mobile : place and human context

Some people elect to stay living in one place forever. If this is the case, the people conform to their context in entirety, thus becoming sown into its immaterial systemic network of flows and connections, like a nervous system woven deep into a body, or the entwined roots of many trees becoming one gigantic system underground. Thus, if there is proposed great change, it will be limited because the human context woven into the landscape context will react as fiercely as it would be if the proposed changed was upon its own human body. Alternatively, the human context may also respond to the change with inclusion, inviting it in as part of its own.

Some people elect to move across many places, and live as nomads. If this is the case, their contexts change frequently, and the people become dipped in the flavors and set in the ways of each place passed through, as well as learn to find a skin to comprise the individual, a selective identity influenced brick by brick, footstep by footstep. Much like ants crawling across a landscape of striations, danger, and difference, the nomad with deep reciprocity to the changing context, is at once bound and mobile, like the finite freedoms of a leaf floating endlessly on the surface of the sea. Thus, if there is proposed great change, the human context may find it an opportune moment to make of new travels, to go or stay, or to create new places set layered within the contexts of current, or reminiscent of past days. Alternatively, the nomadic human context may observe the change as divergent from their own paths and flows, and strike response by demanding a reprise to make present what once was but is no longer.

(c) M. Waxman 2007