Unlocking the gate

Buying property is such a strange concept. On the one hand, it's nice to think "Oh this particular house is our home, it's ours!" There is usually
a deed which legally confers ownership of a duly measured parcel of land upon which is a structure where it's okay to have our stuff. And a good title company can provide a "chain of title" which shows every owner this plot of land here has ever had going back, presumably, to the days of the Mexican Land Grants (and maybe farther). On the other hand, the land a plot sits upon has been here farther back than humans have recorded history. "Ownership" may have been established by whatever brute claimed it, whether the brute was a cave dweller, an indigenous clan or tribe, an imperial country, a country manifesting destiny and, possibly someday, another post apocalyptic cave dweller.

But today, we think nothing of fencing off our small bit of refuge to demarcate ours from theirs. And the entrance, whether it is the door to a flat in a high rise, a small white wooden gate in front of a cottage, a secured entry in a gated community or a wide red ranch gate usually has a lock and our key unlocks our entryway to our home. But spending time here in the wide open spaces, I wonder about this notion of ownership. In the history of the land our ownership seem meaningless, a millisecond of an eon in which we claim our dominion over all we survey (within the boundaries of our deed, that is). And though the millisecond may be our lifetime, to the land, our paper deed is nothingness, it's not even the dot of the i in the word nothingness.

But we want a place anyway, even if it's for a millisecond, it will be our millisecond.