Matthew Arends
9-24-14
Buber Reflection
In this world, all things that are alive have an instinct. They want to stay alive in order to fulfill a certain goal or "project". This is built into our inner being, we must find and fulfill our purpose as a living being and that we must do this at all costs before we die. This is a matter of our ego, or our inner self, something that is not in sight by others but an internal reflection by which we live. Our thoughts, ideals, and beliefs are examples of what can make up out ego and our actions exemplify what it is that our ego wants and what our ego feels about those around us. We, that is to say, all living things can interact with that which is in contact with us as being either objects/tools to be used or as people to experience as Buber tells us in his book. The ideal goal could be said that we experience everything and everyone rather than use everything or everyone. To better explore how we can experience not only other beings but places, it would be good to discuss a place from my childhood and that same place as I visit now.
Deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of the Appalachian wilderness in Virginia, a cabin is placed off a trail that extends from mile marker 19 on the Blue Ridge Parkway into the woods. At this cabin I have often stayed and enjoyed the wilderness around me in all seasons. Often snow several feet deep made my trek into the woods and difficult and long one, but it is through this hardship that the comfort of a warm place heated by fire and the comfortable shelter begins to gain meaning. However, this is not the place in which I have the most real experience but rather a place in which has enabled me to experience others and the surroundings more deeply farther into the woods. The cabin is a portal in which I use to experience much more. About half a mile down the mountain, a place no known trail leads is a small graveyard that I happened to stumble upon in my youth. This graveyard is hidden away and has been for a century with trees a hundred feet or more tall standing where bodies have been laid to rest as far back as the first years of settlement in what was then the frontier of European exploration. It is here that I am able to experience not only myself and the "objects" around me but experience those trees and those marked graves whose bodies have long left the ground as others. The people laid to rest there were a part of the reason I am able to be in this wilderness and their projects have allowed me to have mine, while I see that these trees also have their projects and those graves proved to help fulfill that which the trees needed.
I often lay on a nearby rock or tree who has fallen over and contemplate these people in the graves or the animals in the trees that have used the area to take up their lives. I often feel like I am kin to the people because in truth I am through the connection of nationality in which they made possible. They allowed me to be American and through that I can experience a bond in them and the trees through them and the animals that have made the trees their home. I have taken these head stones and these trees and animals and rather than simply using them as a means to an end, I have made them a part of me and experienced their presence as something that is more important than something that I can use to get ahead. That is what it is to make a place a Person to experience. That is the I-thou. That place is in me and I am a part of it.
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