Excerpted from the book "Here if You Need Me" by Kate Braestrup:

In his book The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, Brian Swimme offers the following exercise:

Invite someone to visit you who lives at least twenty miles away and who has never visited you
before. You can give verbal instructions on how to get to your abode...but the one rule is this: in
your directions you may refer to anything but human artifice. You may refer to hills, oak trees, the
constellations of the night sky, the lakes or ocean shores or caves....ponds, trails or
prairies...estuaries, bluffs, woodland....creeks, swamps...and so on.

No houses, no traffic lights, no streets or streetlights, no firehouses or Home Depots.

Could you do it? And Swimme would argue this incapacity is symptomatic of an estrangement from our "local universe" that has become endemic in our time and place.