Parks,

We need parks and wild spaces to give us silence in the world, and reverence for the world's reveries in which we are invited to partake so long as we listen and sing with it, not "above" it, not screaming to ourselves.

In the wilds and in the country and in the pockets of wild and country within the city, man remembers the artifice in his arrogance, the pettiness of his grandest ideas and visions and ambitions. And in that remembrance, in the purity of that clear moment of understanding, we see the egality of our brothers and sisters living in this world. We understand that before the grandeur of the flowing world any act of Power is foolish, moving but weakly against the concrete infinities of spaces. The space for this understanding is open to all, at every moment, and offers each and all its naked flesh to caress with reverence. The majesty of the moving instant weaves any to another, and all may behold it. Wild spaces give us the strength to laugh at Power, and shame it into appropriate humility.

We need these free spaces to teach us the foolishness of borders and their provisional character, that any tree or stream carves and recarves a property line surer than any geometer, but that this property is not a question of rights but of attention and intensity. Parks show us the separation between will and understanding, and they allow us the peace and freedom to sense the integration of the two.