The Point and the Power of Abandoned Places Part 2: You (& Even MORE Amazing Pictures)
[Be sure to first see Part I of this Abandoned Places piece ...]
Abandoned places.
You’re driving in the country and they are there, some trying to hide behind overgrown weeds or in dark woods like the abandoned house in my Michigan story that concludes below, while others lean obvious against barren landscapes of corn or sand or nothing.
Or you pass them while riding the train through the city or across the entire continent and they stand there in ignored neighborhoods, former towns, and forgotten fields, dead at first glance but then so pregnant when you close your eyes after they pass and you really consider them.
Yes, this surely includes the famous ancient abandoned places like the Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian and Mayan ruins, but you don’t need to wait years or an entire lifetime for the metamorphoses that standing before or within such classic structures can provide. The experience can be just as powerful, perhaps more so, at those abandoned places like a long-vacant house in the woods that are humbler but more accessible.
And it is inevitable that no matter where you are and where you go – though surely some geographic areas are richer in it than others -- you can find these abandoned places. Abandoned homes and abandoned churches. Lost cemeteries. Abandoned schools, farms, factories, cafes, playgrounds and maybe even abandoned prisons or amusement parks.
Your body doesn’t need to wander inside them. Where safety is a concern you don’t even need to wander too near to them.
The point instead is to be in the presence of the abandoned place, even briefly, and to then let your mind and spirit wander inside of them. If you seek a means to stir your soul, to ignite your creativity, to remind yourself and loved ones how fleeting life is and why now …NOW … is the only time to pursue your dreams and purpose, and to know you more, I highly recommend abandoned places.
What I mean is this:
My wife, my mother, my kids and I peered through chunks of missing wall into the long-abandoned house that had been swallowed by the thicket off to the side of a Michigan country road. Though it was mostly dirt and weeds and trees inside, a few remnants like the old rusted refrigerator and the shape of the place itself thoroughly reminded that people once lived and hoped and laughed and cried and failed and tried in there.
And so at one point I saw my eleven-year-old son staring away from the house, off into the trees.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
He looked back at me, no longer the expression of impatient adventure on his face but serious. Serious serious.
“What happened to the family that lived in this house?” he wanted to know.
Which prompted his step-sister, standing behind me, to ask, “And were they a happy family, or were they sad?”
And this is the transformative power of abandoned places.
These questions and others like it had passed through my mind the first time I spied this abandoned house in the thicket. Standing in its presence these questions and others like it had now been passing through my spirit. My wife’s too. My mother’s too, and she responded to the kids with the only answer that could be given to such intense questions:
“I’m not sure, but who do you think lived in it? And do you think they were happy or sad?”
This prompted consideration and discussion. Being eleven, and being a boy with a vivid imagination, my son decided that a family of thieves had lived there. They had robbed the residents in the nearby town of Port Austin one too many times in the night, he would add back in the car, and so the residents banded together and killed them all. Later he would change that to merely running the family out of the house and out of the area forever.
My step-daughter, ten and more the realist, disagreed. She decided they were pretty much an average family. Probably a mom, dad, brother and sister. Probably mostly happy, but with some sad times like all families go through. And maybe the last sad time, like running out of money to pay their bills, forced them to leave this house and move into an apartment in Detroit.
As adults, my wife, my mother and I had different answers to these questions. And other questions prompted by the answers. Some of these we voiced, others we kept to ourselves. And of course, none of it had anything to really do with whoever had actually lived in that long abandoned house.
Instead the questions and answers that came to our mind had everything to do with who we each were -- what we appreciated, what we feared, what we dreamed, where we had been and wanted to go.
Just as when you stand before an old cemetery and wonder who these people buried here were, and how they lived their lives, and did they die with regrets and what were those regrets, the answers you find are really about you.
Just as when you stand before an old and abandoned prison, or an old and abandoned hospital or asylum, and wonder what the people that were once there did to get there, and what they had to endure, the fears and answers you may face are really about you.
Just as when you stand before an abandoned church and wonder who prayed there, and who led the prayer there, and whose prayers were and were not answered, and who believed and who didn’t really, the answers you find are really about you.
And just as when you stand before an abandoned playground, the monkey bars and merry go round buried in weeds, and for some reason you find yourself weeping, the reason is really about you.
That is the point and the power of abandoned places.
---------------
Abandoned Church in Mexico
Abandoned Farm in Iceland
Abandoned Car
Abandoned Hotel in California
Abandoned Kitchen
Abandoned Rollercoaster 1
Abandoned Rollercoaster 2
Abandoned Rollercoaster 3
Abandoned Copper Mine Building in Alaska
Abandoned Ship in Alaska
Abandoned Bokor Palace Hotel in Cambodia
Abandoned Church and Cemetery in Wales
Abandoned Train Car in Illinois
Abandoned Playground
And be sure check out the final fifteen amazing Abandoned Places photos...
See "The Point and the Power of Abandoned Places Part 3: The Final 15 Abandoned Places Photos" Now
[P.S. If you enjoyed this, please feel free to subscribe to this free blog. Don't have any idea how to subscribe to a blog? Start by clicking on the RSS 2.0 button above, and then check out the Wikipedia article it links to. J ]