Landscapes lately

At the grocery store checkout today, I lined up behind a woman with a massive stack of stuff in her cart, 6th or 7th in line. There was only one cashier open out of the 8 potential spots, and an absurd line up behind the one open cash.

She turned to me, impatience percolating. “I can’t believe they have 8 wickets and only one cashier on”.

“Profits are up”, I answered. There’d been a headline in the papers just yesterday – better than expected profits this quarter. Easy to see how they do it.

She took a beat, as if shifting into second gear, the better able to tell me what she really thought. “The greediest family! The only ones greedier are the Walmart family”.

THIS is the landscape everywhere. Across this country, and from the sounds of it, most others as well.

In our neighbourhood, all three businesses within view are closing their doors. The bank of course, it’s just the branch; the Popeyes, also a bit of a regional franchise failure; and the cannabis store beside the Popeyes, well… hard as we all tried, they just didn’t survive.

During my summer out west, I heard jokes about how BC stands for “bring cash”. Plenty of struggles out there as well.

But it was summertime, and so it was time to kick back and enjoy the good weather, and we went to all the beaches up and down the coast – one afternoon of full on Pacific Ocean, but mostly up and down the Strait of Georgia.

Everywhere we went was breathtakingly spectacular. Just insanely beautiful.

But I realized there was one beach that stayed with me especially.

There was something about the proximity of the mountains just across the way on the mainland and the almost protected feeling of the waters in between.

Tiny fish darting at every step, seaweed waving lazily, crabs scuttling in all directions.

Something about this grove of Ocean and Mountains and primeval life forms gave me a sense of a kind of Birth of the World, or the Origins of All Species.

Swimming there I felt almost as if I was swimming in the dawn of creation.

This sensation was the most beautiful reminder of all the stages of the world – all the mysterious pre-human stages, the early human hunter-gatherers, and then the slow slow move to agriculture… and only just recently the massive shifts to industry, to technology, to predatory capitalism.

Nothing is forever.

We can dream a better dream any time we want.

Lens Artists Challenge – Landscape