Borders, Biology and Beyond.
Borders are the most interesting places. In terms of ecology, they’re always the most bio-diverse part of any ecosystem, in terms of politics – they’re the areas of most complexity, where entirely new ideas tend to form that represent a divergence from anything which came before; by synthesising new realities, with old ways, unable to survive the fickle transience of cities. They’re also bi-layers which facilitate transactions, between free and independent nodes.
The borders are also the peripheries, furthest from the ‘out of touch’ urban centres – they are therefore, both historically and in modern times, the areas most likely to be first to break-free from the bondage of a decaying establishment… in terms of the ethnocultural sphere, borders are the points-of-exchange, they define the semi-permeability of ideas, of models, ‘fluids’ and truths… indeed, of whole worlds. Borders are the surface tension of life! More borders, mean more life – more independent-complexity, more diversity and more beauty.
Mythologically speaking, they separate ‘our world’ from ‘the other’ – the world of the living, from the dead – of the wild from the tame, the safety of the settlement from the savagery of the wilderness. Borders are present everywhere in nature, from the smallest cells of your body, to the shores and rock-beds of the ocean, from the stratifications of the Earth’s stratosphere to the outer limits of milky way’s galactic plane. Borders are not a human concept, nor a product of the human mind, they are an observable referent and integral part of our biological, geological, electromagnetic and ethnocultural reality. They are a part of nature at the most fundamental level; and just as we are beginning to learn about the consequences of ignoring the Earth’s ecological boundaries and limitations, so to must we begin to understand, and develop a reverent appreciation for the Earth’s ethnocultural complexity, and the borders and bi-layers which hold it all together.
In the words of Pesr Waira of Velasco Tumino in Misak, Colombia…
“Territory, for me, is life itself.”
Source of quote: https://www.lifemosaic.net/eng/tol/benefits-of-territory/
Image is of a decorated horse skull, or ‘Mari’ which forms part of an ancient tradition kept by the Cymry (the Welsh), the photo was taken at the annual Chepstow Wassail and Mari Lwyd. Wassailing is an Anglo-Saxon tree-blessing tradition, of unknown origins, which has survived along the Welsh borders and is today undergoing a revival.
