BACK TO EDEN, BACK TO NATURE.
Text: Maria Di Paola Blum
Photos: Maria Di Paola Blum & Verónica Venegas
La querencia is the natural tendency of animals to return to their
place of birth. Something like that is what man is experiencing
now in regards to the land, his home land and the land where we
all come from, the one called eden, meaning a dwelling place where
men lived in harmony with nature. Man, after the excitement of the
ultra fast vegetable crops he achieved by manipulating genes and
using chemicals, now admits there is a better taste and a healthier
content in those grown organically, nourished by the humus and the
sun, and which take their time to grow. He is looking now, and paying
extra for what we call health food, free from chemicals. The Dalai
Lama asserts that the difference between the life of man in the
early stages of his development and the man of our times can be
reduced to “speed”. We have added speed to our way of
life. We do everything faster: think faster, travel faster, we do
more in less time. Large cities with their vertiginous rhythm have
made us tired of them; they have taken from us what is essential
to being a person, and have made us fearful, closed in ourselves,
bewildered, and have pushed us into a hurting solitude. In those
cities it is easy to understand why Hobbes asserted: “Man
is a wolf to man” All this explains why there is an ever growing
tendency in man to return to nature instead of living in large cities
encapsulated in an “intelligent building” which closes
the window for you exactly when you would rather see the sunset;
turn the air conditioned on for you, open the doors as you pass
by, and turn the TV on at news time so you can see the havoc caused
by man’s modern inventions: instead of one man getting killed
by falling off a horse, three thousand get killed in the front crash
of two “bullet trains” because there was a one second
collapse in the power supply of the train computer, and so many
of your beloved ones ended up in paradise, leaving in the sadness
of earth those who remained weeping because by living at such a
high speed they did not have the time to love their beloved ones
who ended their lives in the train crash. That is why our original
lifestyle is becoming so popular: calmness, natural surroundings,
pure air, the marvels of silence away from strepitous sounds of
the city, the pleasure of talking with grandpa, instead of placing
him in an assisted living quarters. For all this and for the diseases
we have caused to ourselves with the fast food diets and other high
tech inventions, we now want to eat amaranto and organic peas and
we want to drink chlorophyll and goat milk. Man rediscovers the
natural space he abandoned in the pursuit of the adventure of prospering,
and comes back to his origin. Just like the horse! He builds again
adobe houses with large gardens and winding trails leading to his
door. He loves the sun, the rivers and creeks and cares for dying
lakes, like Lake Chapala. People from large towns come to enjoy
the scenery and to follow mountain trails along creeks and cascades.
In the Chapala Riviera you may find now many options to live in
this bit of paradise with its exuberant nature: developments including
three acres of woods, surrounding the homes facing the lake amidst
the mountains that seem to embrace the lake suspended between the
sky and the earth, and where the prevalent sound is the song of
the birds and the whiseling of the wind.
