Undeveloped Land

Films set in the American west usually feature dramatic settings of canyons, cliffs, and raging rivers, but more often than not, they also get set on a backdrop of wide open spaces.  While your average North American urban dweller might disagree with the statement, there are still many such places on the continent.  In northern Mexico, western United States, or much of Canada, one can go miles without seeing so much as even an animal amounting to more than a squirrel.  While we humans tend to dominate the scene even in places as remote as Antarctica and our moon, one can still easily run out of cellular reception in such places, the only trace of our reach being in the GPS signal which seems to reach us just about anywhere.  Here and there, too, one might encounter a road:

This messy picture was taken along lonely Utah 24, at dusk and with bugs on the windshield.  This is somewhere between I-70 and Hanksville, looking south, and yes, there are no bathrooms in sight.  

Of course, this would be the limit of our development in these places.  A road, after all, is a passage meant to take someone someplace else, and roads such as these are mainly just there to get people away from there.

Beyond that, we have plants and the local geology.  While the areas lacking population, which usually tend to be deserts and grasslands, are perhaps the best places to get lost in such quiet reaches, the truth is that they can be found in any abandoned field, undeveloped woodland, or swampy area.  We have the luxury of having more of these than in most other parts of the world, at least as far as having them close enough to where we live is the case.  Every morning on the way to work, I pass by one of the few remaining Tamarack bogs in southeastern Michigan.  The land is otherwise surrounded by development, but in one marvelous little stretch, we get a glimpse of something older than us.  Again, sometimes even the other creatures of the earth settle down and leave the place quiet; on cold mornings such as these, not a chirp or rustle can be heard, nothing but a breeze moving through the branches and the sun breaking away the fog.

Various religions make usage of simple images to help quiet rather than stimulate the mind.  The icons of some Christian traditions are examples of this.  While some practitioners use them as instruments of prayer and veneration, they are more so meant to invite the viewer into something of a staring contest, helping to quiet distracting thoughts and direct one to a different layer of reality.  So it is with our bits and pieces of undeveloped land, things we have built around and left behind.  Nature can be quite good at giving us breathtaking moments of awe, but it can be just as good at reducing our activity to something more primordial.  That tree or pile of rocks sitting across the street, that field that they sit in?  It might be labeled an undeveloped plot, and it might not be as remarkable as a great vista in a national park, but in some ways it is just as valuable.