Easter Morning Reflections
Yesterday, a friend asked, "What do you think is the most important issue in the Hill Country?" We talked about water, development, ranching and the return of the New World screwworm. But sitting with the question overnight, my answer came back to the same thing I've found in every landscaped I've lived.
The most important issue is 'right relationship'. Or simply, love.
Many of the structures that once gave life its shape over the past century have loosened. Systems once seen as stable (hierarchy, bureaucracy, religion) were challenged as limiting, and thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari helped reimagine the world as open, shifting, full of possibility.
They were right to question rigidity. But over time, what began as critique has become our new condition. What was once a stable way of living has become fluid.
As Bauman observed, when fewer things hold, more is left to the individual. There is freedom in this, but also strain and pressure. Identity must be continually assembled. Meaning, which was once shared by communities, became something we have to carry alone.
Between rigidity and dissolution, something essential has been forgotten from the equation.
Love. Not sentiment, but a consistent orientation toward what is good, expressed through care, attention, responsibility. Love is what allows things to stay intact without hardening and to change without falling apart.
We see this in the land. Water, soil, and community don't fail in isolation. We are all connected and so failure happens when relationships break down.
This is the work at La Cuna. We are not imposing a fixed model and we are not wandering aimlessly, but learning to balance structure and creativity.
It has been slower and quieter work than I have wanted. It is grounded in a simple shared belief: that the health of a place depends on the quality of its relationships. And that still, love holds all things together.