It's summer in Minnesota. It's nasty hot outside, we haven't hardly seen a drop of rain (at least on this side of town) in who knows how long, and we all know how I feel about hot and sunny weather.
Recently my Fossil watch died, so I had to bring it in to a Fossil Store to get the battery replaced. The only Fossil Store we have around here is at the Mall of America. Malls are my least favorite places to be, and so I think I can safely draw the conclusion that the Mall of America is my least favorite place to be in America. To me, they represent everything that's wrong with our system, and the MOA is a stadium-sized altar on which we sacrifice our time, money and sanity to the material gods of our culture. And the most frustrating part is that I am still maddeningly and willingly dependent upon this system. So needless to say a mall on a hot summer day, while the A/C is nice, is not my favorite place to be.
Fortunately, the Twin Cities is a place of balance.
For those of you who don't know Minneapolis, there's about a dozen or so lakes with parkways around them, as well as a six mile stretch through the heart of the city called Minnehaha Parkway, a road that parallels the winding Minnehaha Creek. There's bike trails, arching bridges and enough trees and birds to make you forget that you're in the midst of 3.1 million people and only a few miles from the largest megamall in the U.S. I made my way across Lake Nokomis and turned west onto the parkway, put down the windows, opened the sunroof, and immediately noticed that there was easily a 15 degree temperature difference between the streets and the parkway. The speed limit is 25, and it's single-lane, one-way. Under normal circumstances, this is a driving nightmare for me, because I can't stand 25mph speed limits and want to blow past anyone who actually uses them. But driving on Minnehaha Parkway is the antithesis to my, and probably most of America's, way of life. Soaking in the rural in the midst of the urban, creation in the midst of destruction, the natural and the real in the midst of our synthetically satisfying lives, is a little bit closer to how we were meant to live, and it's a good place to be.
But it shouldn't just be confined to one little narrow strip of green space in a field concrete and pollution. That place where we go should not be separate from the lives we lead. Ask yourself what's real; the daily going to work and the shopping and the gas pumps and the "reality" TV? Or is it the making people smile or the time spent in your garden or at the park or having a beer with friends or simply sitting alone with a cup of coffee staring out the window that makes you feel more alive, more attuned to who you really might be beyond your job title and net worth?
I believe this is the definition of "recreation", to do as the word says, to "re-create", or re-realize what's real and how you were meant to be. We live in an immensely complex world of money, politics, anger, me-first and gimme-gimme, and if we were all constantly engaging in recreation, the world might be in a bit better shape.
Who, What and Why?
- Ian C
- I live in the north, where it's cold and we spend a lot of time indoors, steeping in our own turbulent thought lives. Besides being cold, another thing about "north" is that all of the instruments we can conjure to find what "north" is, all point us in a direction that's *not quite* north. Indeed, our north-pointing compass will ultimately lead us somewhere *south* of north. And, standing at "True North", one realizes that the "directions" they've learned no longer hold their bearing, and the world becomes upside down. These are stories from one man's journey to find True North.
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