BRYANT IN THE PARK (NOT)

"To him who in the love of nature holds / Communion with her visible forms, she speaks / A various language; . . . ("Thanatopsis"). But to the perambulating patrons of the park where I walk my dog, she is often not heard at all. An unpleasantly large number of park walkers leave their dogs behind and bring their cell phones instead. It is amazing and offputting to see people who ostensibly go into the woods to escape the hubble and bubble of urban and suburban existence, oblivious to the trees and the birds and the sunshine around them, still clinging mindlessly to their cell phones and wrapped in conversation with some disembodied voice far away. Where is the present, the moment? What is the point of coming to the park but to leave behind the artificiality of our too electronic lives? After all, Nature is the missing reality to most of us. We spend our days in an environment were we walk from our concrete driveways, to concrete parking lots at the workplace, shopping center, theatre, school, church, or other place we visit, without once setting foot on the actual ground, the earth in which we have our sustenance. In paving over the surface of our planet we have obliterated an important part of the real world; by taking a cell phone or other electronic contrivance everywhere we go, we change the remaining fragments of that world to a soulless virtual reality.

What has happened to the poet in us?