Facts & Fallacies About Urban Spirituality (Of Thespiae)
FALLACY: Urban spirituality is about hating the wilderness and / or rural lands.
FACT: Urban spirituality is simply lacking a spiritual connection to the rustic lands. We acknowledge that the rural lands are necessary, and we acknowledge a dependency on them for survival, but the celebration of said is kept to a minimum, and is never a lifelong focus of the urban spiritualist.
FALLACY: Even people with a deep spiritual connection to cities must get out in the woods every so often for their physical and spiritual well-being!
FACT: That really depends on the person. Some do, others do not. People with allergies to pollens tend to avoid rural and wooded lands as a precautionary measure for their physical well-being — and sometimes, all the antihistamine in the world can’t prevent an allergic reaction, sometimes one even has an allergy to allergy meds. While one cannot deny the higher concentration of pollutants in urban areas, recent studies now suggest that the biggest contributor to both urban congestion and local pollution is actually people commuting from the suburbs. In large metropolitan cities, a proportionately very high percentage of people use public transportation as their primary mode of travel, when compared to that percentage in smaller towns (which seldom even have decent, if any public transportation), a majority of cars on the streets of Chicago at any one time are most likely to belong to people from the suburbs who’d rather ferry themselves in inside their little status-symbol-on-wheels rather than taking the Metra in from Aurora. If you want to reduce pollution, become a farmer who ventures out to the city a few times a month, or move to the city and get a transit pass.
Read more at Of Thespiae
This is an awesome post. Among other things, it does a good job of debunking the common misconception that paganism = nature worship.
I love nature myself and live in a pretty rural area, but I can completely understand where the writer’s coming from because by and large the nature-centric pagans are hung up on forests - and I live in a desert.
