Yesterday I left work with my newly-acquired iPod playing all songs alphabetically.  I started with “Mama Said Knock You Out” on a break earlier in the day, and I was only far enough along in the song queue to get to “Miner’s Refrain,” a spare and beautiful lament by Gillian Welch.

Cars and buses whizzed past and the wind blew through the concrete and steel canyons of the Sydney CBD as we pedestrians made our ant-like ways towards our train stations, bus stops, and cab ranks.  At first I was struck by the contrast between what I was seeing and what I was hearing: a slow song resonating with the lethargic buzz of the country amid a swarm of urban concrete, metal, asphalt, and flesh.

As I listened more and thought more, I decided I was wrong.

I heard Gillian sing, “I’m down in a hole; I’m down in a hole; down in a deep, dark hole.”  And I thought it’s only because that man is in that hole extracting the coal that runs my local power station or the ore that eventually makes my train and tracks and the frame of the skyscraper where I work–it’s only because of that work that this city is even possible.  But it’s only because the city is here that many of those people in the country have jobs: large-scale urban centers create demand for rural resources.

Folks, we’re all us, one big mutually-dependent gaggle.  Existentially, we’re all down in that hole together.

Are we starting to imagine together what the landscape at the top of that hole might look like?

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