I was looking around the other day, and it sank in just how good of a spot my family is in for future permacultural potential. To illustrate what I'm talking about, I painted my neighborhood for you to see .

(created with mspaint, referencing googlemaps. scale given only as loose reference)

The blue block labelled "me" is my family's house. The "yard" next to our house is our yard, as is the "yard" directly behind our house, extending to the alley (the land slopes down after the line/fence). The gray areas in the yard are concrete (the black dot on the concrete square is the basketball pole). The brown patches are the existing garden areas, almost completely plantless at this point, save one rose bush, but mulched over heavily. They are the areas I intend to plant this spring.
But looking into the surrounding area, there is an incredible amount of green space that could feasibly be guerilla gardened in the future, as control systems get looser. The big field across from the house to the north of us (which is gutted) is city owned, I believe (well, at least it's city mowed...). The big field behind our house is owned by a church (not pictured, but I show their parking lot). Continuing east, the field across the street is owned by the city. It used to have a building on it (as is true of all of these areas), and has been subjected to some earthworks (there's now little rolling hills, with single trees planted at the top of each). Note the community garden on the corner. I'm considering renting a plot next year to grow some annuals. The grass medians in the road to the north could be planted (they're maintained by the same people who garden on the corner). And west of our house there is some fenced-in private property that could eventually be utilized by the neighborhood, far in the future. One note of concern my dad pointed out is that there's a lot of housing development right now on that northern street, and it could spread to the church owned field, or on any of the other fields.

The two trees in our yard at the moment are a maple (overhanging our yard in the corner) and a cleveland select (in the front/side yard). You can see how many (or few) trees there are in the surrounding neighborhood (most notably, there are two huge mature oak trees (I think they're burr oak), one of them being pictured south of us across the street). I want to increase the numbers of those wise beings in this land. That is my highest aspiration at the moment - to plant trees.

I'm starting to research the plant nurseries in the area to be ready to make my order come late winter. But I wonder, how would I build a forest when the nurseries are closed (hopefully, far in the future)? If there are no good specimens to graft from in the area, I'd have to start from seed. But what if I don't have the right kind of seeds available? How easily, really, could I start a permacultural garden post-collapse? Or is this (ad)venture something that is only feasable to begin from within civilization? I'm not doubting that a forest garden of sufficient size could sustain us during and after a crash, but it seems it would be a necessity to already have the forest at least in it's adolescence to have a chance.

If there is one overarching lesson I am learning these days, it is how to adapt, to readjust to changing conditions. I could let myself be immobilized by fear that my forest will be years too young even as I need to come to depend on it, or I could prepare to be able to shift lifestyles completely. While I'm watching the plants grow, I'll also still be out there learning to track rabbits (there are at least three that live on my block) and gathering acorns and lamb's quarters and dandelions. And I plan to volunteer at the urban farm/csa, new roots, in north city, hoping to make connections and build relationships with others throughout the area attempting to produce their own food - maybe get a little rhizome network going. All in all, I'm not overly concerned about the future, and I'm doing what I need and want to be doing at the present.


I just thought it was nifty how much "green space" I have around me, in the middle of the city, when I took the time to notice.

Short rainy days and long dark nights lead to a lot of time spent indoors thinking for me. I'm just happy this is the darkest it gets, and that while the cold is just beginning, it keeps getting lighter after this! Happy solstice, everyone!

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about what I'm going to do in the future. I am home/unschooling Mike for the rest of the school year, and I'd like to get at least a small food garden growing this april, if only for the experience. Beyond that, I'm not tied down to any one thing, and I wouldn't want to be either. I would love to continue unschooling my brother until he is 16. I want to take him to see Dancing Rabbit next summer. So I fantasize about living there with my brother, start on growing the beginnings of a big forest I'll live in, having that as a homebase, and still travelling around the country with my bro as long as bus fares remain reasonable to see what there is to see and learn what there is to learn, maybe do some wwoofing along the way (and when there's no organic farms around, maybe some impromtu camping/hunting and gathering in some national forests).

That's still looking only into the somewhat intermediate short term future. Which is really all the farther I feel the need to look. I suppose in my fanasy there is the implication that I'll settle down eventually at DR. From a practical standpoint, the only thing I'm sure of is that I want to become community-sufficient in procuring all the necessities of life. As I learn skills to head in that direction, I suppose I plan to spend my energy learning and practicing whatever is the most fun. Right now, I'm really into the magic of growing things. This only manifests itself in reality at the moment with my sprouting of wheat berries in a jar on the countertop, but I find it so amazing - captivating - to play with life! And death (that is, eating, in this case).

Reading Ted over the last couple months, there were points where, when he brought up parallels between his own body type and those of certain primitive peoples, that I realized that my body is really not adapted to any environment that I know of. I'm tall and skinny, so I would theoretically do well in very hot environments (and not so much in cold ones), but I'm also incredibly pale. And where there is heat, there is also generally a lot of UV rays to burn the skin when it's not blocked by melanin. So damn, where can I live? Someplace temperate and cloudy? I figure the climate will be changing so much within my lifetime (and unpredictably, too), I might as well stay where I am (meaning missouri) unless/until it forces me to move someplace else. Well, with global warming, the height/skinniness should come in handy, and maybe if that continues in combination with global dimming, I'll have the perfect body type for where I live! If only. . .

Another xkcd comic I love, entitled Nihilism.

This is pretty much exactly the reason why I haven't been blogging as of late. (comic from xkcd)

I really want to be able to just live without habitually thinking about how whatever I'm doing can make me look good to someone else. I've been an internet addict, and showcasing myself on this blog has been part of that addiction. I've begun to wean myself off the internet, gradually. I no longer feel the compulsive need to check my email all the time or refresh my feedreader five times a day. Actually, what I've done that has allowed me to get some distance away from the computer and spend some quality time with the real world is get really into food. I love food. Not just eating it, but even more so, playing with it. The vacuum of time I found myself freefalling in that I used to wastefully fill up retracing my steps over and over again on the internet I now spend fermenting, sourdoughing, sprouting, cooking, baking, washing dishes, reading really interesting cookbooks (like wild fermentation or nourishing traditions), and yes, eating. Certainly I still inevitably get on the computer towards the end of each night to check in with the goings-on of the cyberworld, but it no longer demands my near-constant attention as it used to.

Now food does that. And I'm much happier because of it.

My diet has actually undergone a pretty substantial revolution in the past month or two. I gave up peanut butter cold turkey. I don't fully know how or why I did it , but one day I was still eating my regular lunchtime meal of a humongous peanut butter sandwich (with the layer of pb between the slices of bread being as wide as one of the slices of bread) and the next day I found something else to eat instead. Pbj's (or for some lengthy intermittent spans of time, pb's) had been my lunchtime staple since I was two- throughout my childhood as a picky eater, thriving even more as I became vegetarian, and carrying me through my most recent period of purgatory hovering between vegetarianism and omnivorism. I suppose a couple things changed at once that allowed me to make the transition from constantly fatigued pb-fanatic to my present nutritionally healthy state. 1) my attempts at souring dough finally suceeded and I began to regularly consume sourdough pancakes, and 2) I started getting high quality bacon and grass fed burgers from a natural food store. A couple weeks after quitting pb, I was looking for a quick bite before going out, and I grabbed a spoonful of peanut butter only to find that it now tastes nowhere near as good as it used to (actually, more bad than good). So I'm pronouncing myself cured of my peanut butter addiction, as well as very happily an omnivore again.

If you're curious, my meals these days often go something like this: an apple first thing in the morning (granny smith's are my current favorite), then often a sourdough pancake, with butter and real (grade b) maple syrup on top, then often in the afternoon sometime a salad of sorts consisting of whatever sprouts I have going (wheat berries, quinoa, clover) mixed with some Ezekiel brand sprouted cereal, flax seeds, and whole-fat yogurt. And every few days I have a midday meal of meat, taking care to include as much saturated fat as possible. I usually have some form of eggs for dinner- an omelet or a couple over easy or scrambled or "in a (sourdough) basket". Oh yeah!, I've also made two loafs of real sourdough bread, one breadpan shaped and one round. And I've made two pumpkin pies with sourdough crusts. On halloween, instead of eating refined sugar, I made "urban legend" cookies with Rapadura and whole wheat flour, which the family enjoyed very much as well. I also gave up caffeine, except in chocolate form of course, so I've been exploring the world of herbal teas (mmm, especially with raw honey). I've also been taking bee pollen as a whole food/superfood vitamin supplement (I can't wait till spring comes to see how much it'll mitigate my seasonal allergies!). I cook with either olive or coconut oil, depending on the dish, and I bake with organic butter. I just made a batch of nut bars the other day, but they're really rich! (I used almonds, cashews, brazils, dates, and maples syrup, in decreasing order of amounts) I got a headache the first day from eating two and a half bars, and I won't be making that mistake again. I've got several different juices fermenting wildly right now- apple, grape, cranberry/blueberry. And I've still got some of my blueberry mead left. It's aging beautifully, but unfortunately I made the mistake once of shaking up the dregs before serving it to some friends. I like the dregs! But my friends don't.

Other than preparing, cooking, and eating food, I've also been dreaming of growing it again. I've recovered fully from my detour away from permaculture with Devin and now eagerly await to play with the space my family has made available to me in our yard. This is still one area where I can only read up on right now and can't do much yet except sheet mulch the beds, continue composting, and tinker with a homemade rainwater catchment system (so far, my problem is that the trashcan I'm diverting the water into fills up too fast and overflows! I've just reconnected the pipes to run into the sewer for winter, but I eagerly await holding onto and fully utilizing that water in the spring (perhaps even filtering some of it to drink?). Right now my vision for the garden is of a woodland edge garden, as that would fit the space I have availabe perfectly for now. If I were to stay here with my family on a more longterm basis, I would want to start maybe convincing them to let me turn the side yard into an orchard, and all of the yard behind the house, and down the back hill, and even in front of the house (you know that narrow strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street- I'm thinking a male and female couple of some undetermined species (probably an apple). That brings me to a question I've been pondering- If I were to build this woodland edge garden, and I only had room for one tree to start out with, what tree would be best to use? I want it to provide some food (either fruit or nut) and, since it's a forest of one, it of course needs to not need a mate to pollinate. I'm still researching, but if anyone has a suggestion, feel free to leave a comment. I'm also excited about using mushrooms in the garden, specifically mycocorrhizal fungi. And maybe with all the leaf mulch I've put down, I could grow some edible fungus too, perhaps the king stropharia. Other than the mycogrow, I really have no clue yet what I'll end up putting in. I'm trying to try out a lot of new fruits and nuts that could possibly be grown, but most just can't be found, even in a farmer's market (I'm thinking gooseberries, juneberrys, currants, and the like). There's a mulberry bush growing right next to our property line that I hope the neighbors leave alone long enough to fruit. We used to have a fruiting mulberry bush/tree ourselves until my family had the yard completely redone with dirt to level the side yard (where a house once stood) and fill in the empty concrete carlot, creating a hill down to the alley. The mulberry tree was actually perched right on the edge of the yard , hanging over the empty parking space like the magnificent weed it was. I don't think we ever ate any of the berries. Just complained about the birds pooping purple on our cars. At the same time as we had the fill dirt put in and sodded over it all, we also put in a concrete slab of a basketball court (this was all ten years ago when I was still ascending towards the peak in my fanaticism about basketball). Now I dream about tearing up that concrete to plant trees in great full southern light. Maybe someday. . .

It's been over a month and a half since I last wrote. That's significant because it's the first time since basically the beginning of this blog that I've let a whole calendar month slip by without writing at least one thing, if only to hold a place in the archive (so that there are no "missing" months). I considered posting something on November 30th, but I really didn't want to. So I didn't. I let go of my need to control this one little aspect of my outward (internet) appearance. You'll notice I also did some cleaning up of the site as a whole. I was feeling cluttered, so I cut out a lot of the bells and whistles and am working on some new pages to share, as you can see, using pbwiki. All of the links that used to be in the sidebar, and some new ones I added, can be found by following the links link to that separate page. And since the focus of this site has shifted from discussion/debate to just me randomly checking in every once in a while, I've removed the fancy html code that allowed for easier commenting/viewing. If there's anything you notice lacking in functionality of the site as a result of my delete-button happy excursion, feel free to let me know.

Regaining Soil and Sanity

Oh, one more thing. I don't know how many people who read this blog also read TaoGnostic, but if you didn't know yet, Dan has moved his blog and writings to a new domain: http://danbartlett.co.uk/. He's pretty awesome, so if you haven't been there yet, check him out.

expand to read full post

Dan had a splash page up while he was busy getting the blog set up, and it was a passage from Wilhelm Reich that I really liked. Since the splash page is gone now, I'll put the passage here -

"It IS possible to get out of a trap. However, in order to break out of a prison, one first must confess to being in a prison. The trap is man's emotional structure, his character structure. There is little use in devising systems of thought about the nature of the trap if the only thing to do in order to get out of the trap is to know the trap and to find the exit. Everything else is utterly useless: Singing hymns about the suffering in the trap, as the enslaved Negro does; or making poems about the beauty of freedom outside of the trap, dreamed of within the trap; or promising a life outside the trap after death, as Catholicism promises its congregations; or confessing a semper ignorabimus as do the resigned philosophers; or building a philosophic system around the despair of life within the trap, as did Schopenhauer; or dreaming up a superman who would be so much different from the man in the trap, as Nietzsche did, until, trapped in a lunatic asylum, he wrote, finally, the full truth about himself—too late. . . .

"The first thing to do is to find the exit out of the trap."

The nature of the trap has no interest whatsoever beyond this one crucial point: WHERE IS THE EXIT OUT OF THE TRAP?

One can decorate a trap to make life more comfortable in it.

This is done by the Michelangelos and the Shakespeares and the Goethes. One can invent makeshift contraptions to secure longer life in the trap. This is done by the great scientists and physicians, the Meyers and the Pasteurs and the Flemings. One can devise great art in healing broken bones when one falls into the trap.

The crucial point still is and remains: to find the exit out of the trap. WHERE IS THE EXIT INTO THE ENDLESS OPEN SPACE?

The exit remains hidden. It is the greatest riddle of all. The most ridiculous as well as tragic thing is this:

THE EXIT IS CLEARLY VISIBLE TO ALL TRAPPED IN THE HOLE. YET NOBODY SEEMS TO SEE IT. EVERYBODY KNOWS WHERE THE EXIT IS. YET NOBODY SEEMS TO MAKE A MOVE TOWARD IT. MORE: WHOEVER MOVES TOWARD THE EXIT, OR WHOEVER POINTS TOWARD IT IS DECLARED CRAZY OR A CRIMINAL OR A SINNER TO BURN IN HELL.

It turns out that the trouble is not with the trap or even with finding the exit. The trouble is WITHIN THE TRAPPED ONES.

All this is, seen from outside the trap, incomprehensible to a simple mind. It is even somehow insane. Why don't they see and move toward the clearly visible exit? As soon as they get close to the exit they start screaming and run away from it. As soon as anyone among them tries to get out, they kill him. Only a very few slip out of the trap in the dark night when everybody is asleep.."

Tags:

• meta
• civilization
• rewilding

pushing through writer's block

Apparently, I haven't got anything interesting to say. Or at least I haven't for the past three weeks. Today's date being what it is, maybe my luck is changing.

maybe...

I've obviously got writer's block again, which I think stems from some sort of energy blockage in some other part of my life. It feels like a burden to be writing these few words. I can chalk that up to just being the result of an unhealthy rut I'm in with diet and sleep (which is certainly part of it), or I can look a little deeper at what's going on in me emotionally right now. And prose isn't the place to do that. Not at the moment.

expand to read full post

But while I have the mental momentum and my fingers going, I might as well try to make some sort of update on my stable, yet never boring life. Unschooling with my brother is going well. After so much schooling, I anticipated Mike to not really have any natural interest in "learning", but even with as much abuse as he was put through, he seems to be relatively unscathed and still has a very healthy and strong desire to learn. Of course, he doesn't enjoy book learning any more in this setting than he did in school, but he has a passion for building things, working with his hands, figuring out puzzles - in a word, tinkering. We've built a rather large torsion catapult (right now it's really just the arm. we're still refining our methods for actually hurling something...), played with sound-barrier breaking (homemade) whips, started an open fire with a magnifying glass, shoddily constructed a bow with which to shoot "arrows" (point-less, fletchless sticks), and just the other day we fashioned our first spear after being inspired by a book I recently picked up Tom Brown's Field Guide to Living with the Earth. (While I'm on that subject, I'll briefly mention my own unschooling pursuits. I'm reading a whole bunch of books in tandem at the moment (and very slowly): the above title, forest gardening, the book of the damned, the continuum concept, gaia's garden, and the teenage liberation handbook. That last one brings me back to what I was talking about before I most rudely interrupted myself) We've also gone on various field trips - to the zoo, to the magic house, to a food not bombs meeting... Planning on trips to the art museum and science center next. It's honestly a lot of fun. And it be even more fun if I didn't have to worry about complying with Missouri's even relatively lax homeschooling requirements (needing a 1000 hours of "instruction" and some form of evaluation of what "progress" is made).

In other news, I started experimenting with sprouting grains again today, now that I have the appropriate supplies (a mason jar and some cheese cloth). I've sprouted quinoa once a couple months ago but in the confusion of a three day power outage, I didn't get the chance to enjoy eating it. Now I'm attempting to sprout what I hope is viable whole grain berries. I'll let you know how it goes.

My mead has been officially finished fermenting for a week or so now. I drank some with some friends last sunday. It is sweet and yummy. It's so sweet that I'm not yet convinced that it's finished fermenting, but it certainly isn't bubbling very much at all anymore.

I'm wanting to build a rocket stove, but I still need to gather the necessary supplies. I was intending to use the supply list and instructions from Recipes for Disaster which calls for some rather large cans (two 1 gallon cans, one 26 oz. can, and two 16 oz. cans). If anyone in the area has these or other metal containers of comparable size that they wouldn't mind parting with, let me know.


Alright. That's enough prose. I need to go vent my emotions in some less abstract medium.

Tags:

• unschooling
• food
• progress

funemployment

my friend sara sent me these comics today.


(from toothpaste for dinner)


(from natalie dee)


she knows me so well.

Tags:

• nudism
• anarchy
• work

my body remembers fall

I was out and about a lot today, going to different places on my bike, so I had ample opportunity to soak in the newly chilled air of fall. It's amazing how closely the shift in weather is tied with the approaching equinox. Anyway, I realized that this crisp cool weather - the kind of weather that would be really refreshing after the heat of a summer season - had a bit of a negative effect on my mood. It felt like it was weighing me down somehow. I felt ill at ease. I quickly realized that in my mind, this kind of weather change is probably very closely associated with school picking up to full speed, with the heavy workload that entails. This is the first fall in at least 13 years that I am not being saddled with such a burden, but my body doesn't know that. It doesn't yet know that it no longer needs to brace itself for the stress of five hours of homework each night, staying up til 1 or 2, and waking up early and in a hurried panic each morning. This routine has been drilled into the memory of my body. It's going to take a while for me to heal from the abuse I've been through, deinstitutionalize, deschool, unlearn the pattern of expecting and enduring the stress from the daily trauma of school. I want my body to rejoice with delight at the feel of the changing seasons. In the past, I always got seasonal depression at the onslaught of winter, beginning in november when school is at its peak in inducing misery. I can look forward with joy, at least with my mind, to the potential of a stressless november, but I expect it will be years until my body can do the same.

Tags:

• unschooling
• work
• ecology

coming back to my body

I mentioned my low energy level a little over a week ago, attributing it to my willful indulgence in the supposed benefits of civilization - computer, tv, high fructose corn syrup. These things numb me, insulate me from needing to be aware of my surroundings; they put me to sleep. Not even sleep, because sleep is an active time of rejuvenation and imaginative adventure. They steal my life from me. I am heavily addicted to this computer. It sucks me in and keeps me contained inside my head, or, more likely, someone else's head. I'm not going to forcefully limit my time using this contraption because that would never work. Instead I want to simply rediscover a wider diversity of activities to engage myself in that get me out in meatspace. "Teaching" my brother is already helping a lot with that. We spend hours outside playing and searching and discovering and building and being destructive, and every once in a while, we look up some info on the computer, and then go back outside. Now that is the appropriate use of this technology, not staring at the screen for hours, going through the routine of websites I visit on a daily basis, looking for something to catch my attention.

I love making magic happen.

I put up a few boards of plywood in the corner of our yard, throw in some yard "waste" and start collecting the scraps from the kitchen to throw in as well, add some readily available urine, and I've just mixed together the potion for next spring's rich humus-y mulch. It's come alive with the everpresent sound of chirping crickets, gathered around the warmth of active decomposition.

expand to read full post

I mix some honey with water, leave it out in the open stirring in my cauldron for a few days, and it starts to bubble. I transfer it to a jug where it continually bubbles for weeks. It will be ready to enjoy, complete with natural carbonation and vitamin rich yeasty sediment, sooner than seems possible.

I concentrate my attention on an idea for three days, gathering materials from around the house, and in the end, I have a book I just bound myself that will last me for years (probably both in the binding and in the filling of the pages).

This is all pretty awesome. But how much more could I be creating if I weren't drugged by the food I eat and self-imprisoned by the screen of my choosing? I have such a great opportunity to regain some of the childhood I mostly lost to school right now, within the safety and stability of my family's home, to discover and experiment and learn and heal.

I've been reading The Drama of the Gifted Child, by Alice Miller. I haven't gotten very far, but it is certainly striking a cord with me. She talks about the child behaving grandiosely in order to earn the pride and love of the parent, which basically amounts to my perfectionism. I only do or attempt things I am certain to do well at. If I think I might perform badly at something, I just don't do it, or at least avoid it as much as possible. So I'm thinking to heal this habitual inhibiting behavior, I'm trying to seek out things to do that I will not be good at. Right now, I'm learning to write with my left hand. I think I used to be ambidextrous when I was very young, but I broke my left thumb in kindergarten, and ever since, my right hand has been the supposed dominent one. My writing is very slow and awkward, but is actually more legible than the quick sloppy writing of my right hand. I anticipate good things to come out of learning to draw and paint with my left hand. With all my years of schooling, I know part of the reason I feel more comfortable staring at abstractions all day instead of engaging the real world is because of my over-developed left brain, only wanting to analyze and think about everything. I want to exercise my right brain, the hemisphere of creating, imagining, playing, doing. This could potentially lead to some sort of theme of antiperfectionist activities - learning to play an instrument, designing a miniature forest in the backyard, conversing more with strangers, opening up to what my emotions are more (and expressing them in some way), travelling by myself or with other inexperienced people to gain some experiental street smarts, rely on my intuition more in general. The great thing is that all of this goes right along with the journey of rewilding!

Not only do I want to shift from my left brain to my right, I also want to crawl out of my mind and come back into my body. I don't want to simply read about what foods I "should" be eating, I want to learn to feel what my body needs and provide myself with that (like this guy). I want to engage in more personally meaningful manual labor. I want to sleep with the sun. I know I've been saying this for as long as I've had this blog, but I want to give yoga a shot. I want to learn some form of self-defense. I want to learn to fight. I have an overdeveloped cerebrum and an underused body. I can hold my ground in an intellectual argument, but would I be able to still hold that ground if it actually was ground? I watched the movie Fight Club for the second time recently. It reminded me I have to learn over and over again. There's a great danger in living in your mind. You tend to forget that you are an animal, that, just like every other living thing, will die sooner or later. An integral part to being present in this body of mine is being ever aware that it will one day decompose and recompose as a multitude of more life. I need to give up everything, let go of control, let go of my fear of pain and of death, and have a near-life experience.

Today, we were building a torsion catapult in the backyard, and on two separate occasions, I let the arm of the catapult spring into either side of my head. I can only think that this happened because I was more present in my thoughts and my mind than in my body. It hurt. A lot. Both times. (I felt like I was a bad guy in a home alone movie) Later on, I got kind of freaked out because I was remembering an episode of some tv show (probably some csi) where a guy got suckerpunched in the back of the head and, though he walked away from the fight, died the next day from internal bleeding. So thinking about this, I'm basically saying to myself, "oh shit, I just got hit on the back/side of the head twice! am I internally bleeding? how could you tell?" Eventually, I confessed my fears to my mom, and after that, I just put my faith in the gods to take care of me. I tried to re-emerse myself in my body and focus my energy on the swollen part of my head, basically attempting to send healing vibes in my own amateur way. And I also came to be at peace with the remote possibility that today or tomorrow could be the day I die. So, my head is still sore, but I am now without any irrational fears, just peace and an excitment about the potential adventures of tomorrow.

Tags:

• rewilding
• food
• ecology
• pantheism
• unschooling

a hodge podge of notes on the past few days

The mead I started is doing really well. I followed the instructions for making tej, or Ethiopian mead, except I put in blueberries instead of the "hops-like bittering agent" that they normally use, which means that my mead is actually called melomel. I just combined the water and honey (4:1 ratio) in a crock and kept it covered with a towel for nearly four days, stirring several times a day. I added the blueberries to the mix slowly over the four days. By day four (yesterday), it was bubbling, which meant it was time to transfer it to a gallon jug where it will stay for only two to four weeks, loosely capped, until its finished fermenting, amazingly. Everything I had heard about honey and mead was that it took forever to ferment (well, months at least). I guess I'll find out. I'm sure the blueberries helped a lot.

expand to read full post

I'm also in the middle of constructing a journal/notebook for myself, I created and sewed together the signatures last night and put the glue on the spine to dry, and now I'm attaching the covers. It's a lot of fun. I can't wait to finish my current journal so I can start using this one.

I've had a good bit of socializing the last two nights - after a dinner with friends, we went on a latenight bike ride in the full moon light thursday, and last night we had a dance party of sorts (I think I did the most dancing, until I wore myself out at least). I'll be enjoying a night in tonight, listening to the stack of music I picked up from the library this afternoon.

It's been at least (at least) two weeks since I've showered, and even though I've gotten used to my smell (and kind of like it), I'm afraid others have not, so I'll probably take a shower tonight or tomorrow too.

I'm very happy that I am not in college anymore. Dropping out was a very sound move. The only thing I miss is the greater freedom of living on my own (that is, away from my parents). The one thing I do not want to do is mooch. I need to talk with my parents to make sure they don't feel that I'm taking advantage of them. I'm certainly not trying to. I hope we get to a point very soon where my living here for the time being is a mutually beneficial situation. Ran has commented on the idea of mooching before -

Isn't living with somebody without paying them anything called "mooching"?

Yes it is called that, because we live in a slave culture with a slave language! Our ancestors "owned" only small personal items, but now we think we can "own" information and physical space. This idea is a social construction that serves to concentrate power: if I already have power (represented as "property"), those with less power/property have to give me more. If I "own" a space, you have to pay me just to live there, and if you don't, you are taking advantage of me. We have it backwards! It is the alleged "owner" who is mooching, benefiting from the legal right to deny someone their natural right to occupy space in this world, to build a shelter and gather food and live in a cooperative community. (Not that rent-chargers are bad people. Many of them have been forced into a situation where they have to charge rent so they can make payments to still more powerful people.)

Even though I feel my freedom slightly restricted here, it's the best place I could be at this stage, being a safe place to challenge myself to build cooperative community and (in so doing) to heal. I love my family, and I love my friends. I may not have a tribe, but I do have community. If I'm smart about how I use this expanded freedom from dropping out, I expect things to only get better.

Tags:

• community
• unschooling
• food

apathy

I am tired. Lately, I've been allowing myself to freely indulge in and relish civilization on an emotional and intellectual level. Not that I haven't been doing that all along against the wishes of my intellect and emotions. I tend to blame the tiredness on that, but that's really unfair. I'm going to be tired no matter what right now. Lots of new stuff is going on - I'm home/unschooling Mike, Sara's recently moved into CAMP, and other various projects are afoot. But even without all that, I'd still be tired.

expand to read full post

I'm just tired all the time. Part of it is my being in a limbo between vegetarianism and omnivorism, I'm sure. But part of it is certainly some form of depression as well. Not that I'm sad. On the contrary, I'm very much apathetic most of the time. There are so many things I desire to spend my time doing, so much to expend energy on, to get excited about, but when it comes to acting on these desires, I'm met with a whole lot of lethargy. Some things are progressing, but very slowly, in stages, baby steps. I'm searching for intrinsic motivation and trying to balance that with what's still expected of me by others. I'm having a hard time not just shutting down at the prospect of doing anything that isn't intrinsically motivated, so I'm feeling selfish as hell.

When I do allow myself to feel, I feel fragile - like I want to curl up in the fetal position and be protected and nurtured. According to many of my societal circumstances, I am an adult. But I'm not an adult. I'm not ready to be an adult, and I don't want to be an adult. In some ways I may be at the point of coming of age, but in other ways, I am obviously still very much an infant.

While my internal state seems to be rather emo at the moment, my superficial circumstances are rather exciting. I'm so glad that Mike is able to get out of school because of what I can offer. We're going to have fun together. And I'm happy to have Sara as a close friend still, and happy for her that she has a permanent address (for now). It's been fun helping to set her up in her room and helping her build her bike. And we went dumpstering last night - all over town. It was her first time, and it was quite a first time. We hit up the Aldi's, Trader Joe's, World Market, and Sappington Farmer's market. Lot's of potatoes and bananas. More fruit and veggies, and even some chocolate. My brother and I also went shopping at Soulard farmer's market for the first time last saturday for the family's produce needs. No more supermarket produce for me. Oh, and I'm starting a batch of mead, using the recipe found in the Wild Fermentation book. I've also been using the library extensively lately, exploring new music (Neutral Milk Hotel being a new favorite) and reading up on gardening, forest gardens, and permaculture. I am actually rather excited about getting some sort of perennial edible garden going in the back yard. I've got the compost set up. I want to go ahead and start sheet composting too. I'm planning for it to be a no dig garden. I've also got a fire pit set up in the backyard for me to eventually practice friction fires in. The project we've started in homeschooling is learning about and constructing a relatively lifesize catapult (it's what he's interested in).

When I go over all that, I am actually excited and do feel pretty happy. I'm just kind of surfing the flow right now, trying to find my way to the fringes of civilization. I think the sentiments I was remarking on at the beginning of this post come from a dread at the idea of getting some part time work right now (I do want to save up some money to travel to europe with my friend Nathan). Maybe once things with the beginning of unschool settle in I'll be ready for that. For now, I really am tired, and it's because it's 3am and I've been up for 18 hours. So that's all for now.

Tags:

• community
• anarchy
• ecology
• rewilding
• unschooling
• work

truly wild?

Is the goal of rewilding realistic at all? When I'm honest with myself, when I look at where I am now - how very domesticated I am - and where I have yet to go, I'm inclined to say it isn't. There's been a discussion going on between Ted and Ran about this predicament - everyone talking the talk, but no one completely walking the walk. Civilization is a prison, and we've all been in it so long that no one knows how to really function outside of its walls. And we're too afraid to try.

expand to read full post

So far I've mostly looked at rewilding from the perspective of needing to learn skills to be community-sufficient outside of the life support system of civilization, away from all the tubes and chemicals keeping us artificially alive. Skills are certainly very important. But they are really only a small part of rewilding. Beyond meeting the needs of survival, there is the problem of trying to regain a sense of sane community, both with one's fellow humans and with the rest of the world. Giuli at Anthropik quoted something by Tamarack at Teaching Drum that fits situation -

Someone recently asked, "How long does it take from knowing nothing about the wilderness to going off and living in it, and when do you know when you are ready? I basically just have a few books I haven't started reading about it."

This is a profound question, and I see it is the main theme in various group discussions lately. Not a day goes by that someone does not ask me the same thing, or else a related question, such as, "What are the top skills I need to know?" "Learning the Old Ways should be free, like it used to be; why do I have to pay money?" "Where can I find an elder to teach me?" "Is it even possible anymore, with all the hunting and fishing regulations?" "All the land is private or restricted, and I can't afford to buy any, is there anywhere can I go to live primitively?" "I want to learn on my own, what
steps should I take?"

I'm going to give you all some straight talk, in hopes that it will help to steer you on to a track might get you somewhere. The reality of the situation is that I have not met, or heard of, a single person in the past 40 years who has used the approaches that we have been talking about, who
has been able to return to primitive living. This includes the authors of the popular books. Yeah, they might talk a good talk, but look at what they've actually done -- a month in the mountains, a solo year in the woods, some time in Alaska -- is that really living the Old Way? Where is the
clan? Where are the elders? The children? Where is the example and clan memories to learn from?

Why didn't it work for them, and why won't it work for you? Because they carried civilization with them into the wilderness, and you likely will as well. You can learn all the skills you want, and The Mother will spit you back out just about as fast as you went in. The more stubborn individuals
will last a few months or maybe a year, but rest assured, they'll be back.

Why? Because they didn't do their work. We come from a technological society, so we naturally think that substituting primitive technology for civilized technology is our doorway. The only problem is that Native people are not into technology. They spend only a couple hours a day providing for
their simple needs, and they mostly use simple means. Look at their tools -- few and crude, and their craftwork -- basic and utilitarian. What a Native person excels at is what I call qualitative skills -- how to sit in a circle with your clan mates and speak your truth, how to find your special
talent so that you can develop it to serve your people, how to use your intuition, the ways of honor and respect, how to live in balance with elders and women and children, how to speak in the language beyond words, how to befriend fear and live love. Without these skills, you will surely die. Or
else you'll go back to the life that shuns these skills.

Will a book teach you these qualitative skills? Will a class or a workshop? Is learning firemaking or edible plants going to give them to you? They actually take you further away from what you need to know, because focusing on them reinforces the technological approach, and that 95% of your brain
which you don't use, shrivels up even more. We become what we surround ourselves with; the way to learn Truthspeaking is to share with other truthspeakers, the way to bring life back to our dormant brain is to immerse ourselves in the full spectrum of life in which our brain evolved, the way
to elder wisdom is to be with wise elders. There are patterns to break -- crippling, blinding patterns that take continual, unrelenting attention if we are ever going to see, hear, smell, and feel as fully as we are intended. That takes guidance, a supportive environment, and example. Otherwise, it's just another exercise, another class, another walk in the woods, and then
it's back to life as usual, with no end in sight.

Roughly 80% of what a Native person eats is not affected by hunting and fishing regulations. There are vast tracts of public and unregulated private land that are available to a hunter-gatherer, with virtually no human competition. If you think there are a lot of people at your favorite
state park or national forest just step a few paces off the trail, and they all disappear. Very few people really go "out" in the woods anymore. I know a dozen ways to live legally on or adjacent to foraging lands without having to pay big bucks. I can grow fat by living primitively in a farmer's
woodlot or city park. It doesn't take Alaska or the Grand Tetons. It takes shaking off the old preconceptions of what primitive living is and rebecoming the Native person you already are.

It simply can't be done alone. We evolved as social beings, and we literally start going crazy when we spend too much time without company of our fellow creatures. Learning skills alone, buying land alone, is feeding a pipe dream, a romantic fantasy, that will likely only lead to frustration
and disillusionment. Virtually everyone I know who has tried it for any period of time, has given up and bought back into the system. Try to look up some of the older people who once had dreams as you do now. You'll see -- they now have mortgages and jobs with benefits they can't let go of, and
kids' educations they have to worry about. Yeah, they might still be talking about their dreams, and they might practice their skills and head out in the woods now and then, but realistically, when is that dream ever going to become reality?

And then there's the cost of your rewilding. Yes, I said cost, because nothing is free. Money is the least of what you are going to be asked to give. There is a world of difference between something for free and something that is freely given. On a stay with one of my elders in Canada, I built her a cabin. 15 years ago another elder asked me to literally lay my life on the line for him. I would gladly give my last dollar, and much more, for the privilege of walking in my ancestor's footsteps.

The alternative? Sit in the city, whining about how things used to be and ought to be. Or look at the cost of NOT rewilding, and come to realize that one has to give before they can receive. Then you'll be ready to throw away your books, turn your back on the "experts," and turn your face to the wind. You'll start hearing voices that help you walk rather than give you sweet talk. There waiting to greet you will be your clan, your teachers, and your real self. You'll leave survival behind and walk into the Beauty Way.

I don't know where all this leaves me with my own goals. Sure, I'll learn (and use) as many practical skills as possible, probably in both hunting and gathering and in permaculture. But how to become feral? Other animals can do it - cats, horses, goats, pigs. Why couldn't humans? There are stories of civilized humans getting stranded in the wilderness and becoming savage out of necessity, eventually integrating into the local indigenous culture (movies like Dances with Wolves and The Snow Walker), but alas, I doubt I'll be running into any sort of intact indigenous culture. Certainly those are two parts of what makes it difficult to rewild - we lack the necessity to do so (at the moment) and we have no one to teach us -- not only teach us but live with us and become our family.

That's the balance I'm trying to strike right now, I guess. I want to be within a family, and I want to become as wild as possible. I loved Ted's part in his post about truly wild being spear in hand, naked with body paint, and animist. I've at least gotten somewhere on the latter two. And I can't wait to get some experience with a spear. And then to recognize that that is still only the very beginning of the journey back home.

Tags:

• rewilding
• community

hitching

I got back home a couple days ago from a rather spontaneous road trip I went on with a friend. The plan was to hitch to vancouver and back, with part of the journey covered by driving someone's car for them up to vancouver (gas paid). That was arranged through craigslist. That would have been great, except that we were refused entry at the border because we didn't have enough cash on us. In our determination, we attempted to go to another bordercrossing, four hours away. But apparently, that's called bordershopping, which violates their immigration act. So they could have technically thrown us in jail for the night. Instead, we just got chewed out and detained for a couple hours to try to make us sweat. We ended up just having to take the guy's car back to Denver and pay for the gas ourselves. Other than not quite making it to our destination, the trip was very fun. We made some really cool friends while we stayed in Denver for a few days before hitching back.

expand to read full post

The act of hitching itself was a rewarding experience, having faith in the kindness of strangers to get us home. Out of the many rides we got, only one even approached being questionable as far as safety. The guy was driving rather fast, and talking even faster. And let's just say that I think I got second hand smoke from something other than tobacco. He got us out of the middle of Kansas City though. We were very grateful for that. When we started back from Denver, we got a ride really quickly, and from a guy in a very luxurious RV, driving his daughter to college. He drove us for 8 hours from Denver. We watched two movies and had some lively political debate. Other than those two, the rest of our rides were relatively plain. It was always as exciting as hell to be picked up, to have someone actually pull off the road to open up a momentary relationship of mutual aid. Often, the people who picked us up had hitchhiked themselves in the past, or had a parent that used to pick up hitchhikers. One was motivated by his recent conversion to christianity. Others didn't seem to need any special motivation at all - they were just willing to help us out. I think everyone benefited from each ride/pickup in some way.

At any rate, it was a whole lot of fun to do something so spontaneous and supposedly risky. I want more of that in the future.

Tags:

• community
• anarchy

rewild.org taken down

I was just asked by Griffin of the former rewild.org to take down my recreation of their site, so I have done that. I'll remind everyone that the articles can still be found in the internet archive and their zine (which includes most, if not all, of the content on the website) can be found here (unless they're being asked to take that down too). I had assumed that the website went offline from lack of funding because the group had indeed gone out to live their vision, but there was apparently other reasons I'm not aware of that they took it down. I apologize to them if I overstepped a boundary. I'll be removing the now dead link from my sidebar right after I post this. Sorry also to all who already linked to that site.

Tags:

• meta

anima

Today, I tried to spend as much time as possible outside. It was a great day. I get lulled into a daze so easily when inside, in the air-conditioning, with the tv on. It's amazing how much more time I had today, how much more time I was aware of experiencing. I don't like being indoors. I look at the walls, and I see where they came from and what it cost in life and energy for them to be here and the life they inhibit the existence of. I do not see anima. I do not see movement, spirit, life. I know that it's just that I'm not looking deeply enough, that life is everywhere, that this home has a spirit of place, and that my family is contributing to it's evolution by inhabiting what used to be an abandoned board-up. But even so, in my weakened state, in the process of healing spiritually, emotionally, relationally, intellectually, and physically, I can draw more easily from the strength of life outside of these walls, even in this urban habitat. I found a place last night to sleep outside where none of the streetlights or porchlights reach me, leaving the AC units' buzzing as the last main nuisance. It's wonderful to wake up to the sun's warm rays heating my body, like a wierd alarm clock that is comforting yet gradually coaxes me out of my horizontal position. Later in the day, I bathed in the heavy rain of a thunderstorm. My shorts and I had been air-drying ever since. (I think the shorts are finally dry - and cleaner! And look!- no lint!)

expand to read full post

There's a relevant passage from the book I'm reading now, Island, by Aldous Huxley. The islanders are talking about how their particular religion/philosophy (which happens to be mahayana buddhism) causes them to relate to the world-

"If you're a Tantrik, you don't renounce the world or deny its value; you don't try to escape into a Nirvana apart from life... No, you accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself."

It's the journey out of myself and into the world that I'm on. (Conversely, its just as much a journey of rediscovering who I am, going deeper into myself, through that journey deeper into the world)


I do not believe in God. But I have faith in God. (I'm using a broader perception of "God" than people usually do, but I'm using it to be able to share the common terminology with other people and so connect with them better through that language. I could just as easily substitute in "the gods" or "the universe", and I would prefer to, actually, for my own benefit, since the word "God" comes with a lot of baggage, like in explaining what the hell I mean by what I just said...) By that I mean that belief is static, unchanging. It is something people cling to and defend and prove and push on other people. If belief is a holding on, faith is a letting go, a trusting. My understanding of these terms come from Alan Watts-

"Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."

I made the seemingly contradictory statement at the beginning of this paragraph to try to get across the idea of where I am spiritually. Occasionally, I take to calling myself, again ironically, a religious atheist. It's because I truly don't believe in or perceive a sky father deity-type personal god, but I do perceive a spirit, a life-force, in everything around me, in the universe. And I entrust my existence to that life-force. I yearn to live in the hands of the gods. When I say I don't perceive a personal god, I'm not saying that the universe is impersonal, only that I personally feel silly talking to the universe in the dark alone at night (it doesn't mean the universe isn't listening). Any sort of sincere prayer that I could muster would be beyond words. And yet I also find myself searching for ritual. Fun, easy, spontaneous ritual, but ritual nonetheless.

I'm attempting to explore the good that I can extract from my adolescent hyper-religiousness as a part of healing. I can't make the past disappear. Healing requires balance. I think I'm getting through my reactionary phase, and I'm hungry for some soulfood. Great timing, too, because I'm going to spend tomorrow (well, *today*, according to the clock) having fun in the meramec river with some friends.

Tags:

• religion
• rewilding
• ecology
• animism

I just have a few random thoughts that I want to get out, so it might be jumbled.

I'm releasing myself from as many "shoulds" as possible. It has almost turned into something of a running joke among some of my friends that whenever one of us says that they should be doing something, someone else says, "should", in such a way as to make the person question where their motives are coming from. For me, if I can't replace the "should" with "want to", I'm going to find a way to not do it. I didn't vote in the primary election yesterday because I had no intrinsic motivation to do so. That's actually the first election I intentionally skipped. I remember how powerless I felt after each of the handful of times I've voted in the past - that the ritual I had just performed was on the whole meaningless and would effectively change nothing. Its only real effectiveness is in maintaining the illusion of democracy for those awake enough to care but still too myopic to see through the game.

expand to read full post

I want life to be easy and fun. (note that had this paragraph not come right after the first, I would have been inclined by habit to say "life should be easy and fun") It's amazing how much that wish goes against the unspoken assumptions of our culture and of civilization - the assumptions of life being a problem to be solved or a set of numbers to be earned, that most of one's life for most people just has to be hard and boring, and there's no way around it. I don't accept those assumptions, and I intend to be living proof that there is a way around, or out, rather. As I desire, I intend to be unapologetically lazy. And then I'll turn around and be just as unapologetically dilligent and creative in whatever project I'm inspired to pursue. It's so much easier when the motivation wells up from within.

That said, it seems that the process of rewilding is a monumental task, being without a tribe, without a culture, and already beyond the age of peak mental malleability. I intend, though, to build momentum and be persistent in learning as much as I can as thoroughly as I can, and to put that knowledge to good daily use. A lot of what I want to learn about is right in line with my desire for life to be easy and fun. The learning part may be slow and hard (although not boring), but once the knowledge of self/community-sufficiency is gained, it'll make life a lot more easy and stress-free. For one small example, take squatting to poop. Certainly, it's hard at first to fine tune your balance and figure out exactly what position to be in, but with practice, it actually becomes a much easier way to move your bowels. I didn't notice it at first, but once I got comfortable with the process, I could relax and actually move my bowels more quickly and in greater quantity. There was a threshold of difficulty to get past, but now that I'm on the other side, it's so much easier to behave as my body is adapted to behave.

I have more thoughts, but I'm tired of being on the computer, so I might be back later with more.

Tags:

• unschooling
• politics
• rewilding

bicycle fuel economy

My friend Annie sent me a link to a t-shirt design today that had a bike positioned above a sign on a gas pump that read "fuel economy information" and then had, City [infinity sign] and Highway [infinity sign] to the left and right of it.

I also have a sticker on my bike helmet that reads "I get 1000 miles/gallon and I don't pollute" (placed on the left side of the helmet so that it faces drivers and makes them mad/think, should they happen to read it).

I enjoy the sentiment in both of these designs, but neither of them are actually true. Certainly not the first one. But the second one is probably still pretty outrageous. Sure, there's absolutely zero gallons of fuel going directly towards powering the bike. But there's the fuel that went into manufacturing, shipping, and selling the bike, of course. And the oil that goes into maintaining the roads that the bike rolls so smoothly over. But more than that, oil still fuels that bike, just indirectly. Because oil fuels me.

expand to read full post

No, I'm not a robot. I eat regular old civilized human food like everyone else. But that's the stuff I'm talking about. Here's an article, the oil in your oatmeal, that explains what I'm getting at. More fossil fuels go into the growing, shipping, preserving, and preparing of your food than you would think. According to the article's sources, 7 calories of fossil fuel energy goes toward bringing you 1 calorie of food energy.

I'm certainly not knocking bikes. But unless they're eating organic food that they grew (or otherwise gathered) themselves and preserved and cooked it without fossil fuels, the environmentalists are fooling themselves to think that bikes are not powered by oil.

I wonder how far off the sticker I have on my helmet is. The article says that 8 ounces of oil go into the breakfast described, and that over 2 quarts are consumed with that breakfast routine over the course of a week. So let's keep the amount of oil per meal constant and triple it for a week to cover all my meals (6 quarts, which is already a gallon and a half, for 21 meals of fuel, er, I mean food). That means for my sticker to be true, I'd have to be able to ride an average of 71 miles after each of the 14 meals that add up to one gallon of fuel. I know my calculations miss the mark some in how the food is actually divvied up to power the bike, but 1000 miles per "gallon" is not going to happen. Oh well.

Tags:

• bicycle
• food

I am a sponge

There are two verbs I am using to describe what I'm doing now that I've escaped with what's left of my spirit from school - unschool and rewild. They're interconnected, of course. In unschooling, I am primarily interested in learning the skills necessary to rewild- friction fires, shelter constructing, water purifying, hunting, herbal medicine wildcrafting. And more important than all of that is to first strengthen my trust in my own judgement and intuition. I have a lot of healing to do. It is part of both the unschooling and the rewilding process.

expand to read full post

I've already talked about my addiction to praise and ingrained habit of people pleasing. At this point in my journey, it's the biggest wound I need to heal. I have not only been trained - I have trained myself - to obey, but to be pleasing to those I hold up as figures of authority. I please them by molding myself into a person that is compatible with them and with their ideology. I soak up the characteristics of those I put in power over me like a sponge. I have seen this tendency play out most dramatically in my relationship to Devin. Before I met him in person, I was pretty gung ho on the idea of becoming a permaculturalist, starting my own garden, living on the edge of civilization. But only a very short time after I met him in person, I had reshaped my opinions on the subject to match his own - that permaculture is a dead-end and that becoming a hunter-gatherer was the way to go. Of course, Devin spoke of it solely in terms of the way that was right for him and was not pressuring me at all to change my thinking. I did that willingly, if a bit too quickly. It's not that, upon giving it more thought, that I even disagree with his opinions at all. It's that I took them upon myself as absolutes. In my mind, he was the teacher, and I was simply eating up the lessons like I've done for the past 13 years.

This trouble with blind acceptance of whatever I perceive as authority extends in an opposing way as well. Those that I hold up as authority have obviously changed a lot, and it's very hard for me to face those past authority figures who do not necessarily know how I've changed. I'm caught in an internal double bind of not wanting to pretend or wear a mask around them but also not wanting to deal with explaining and justifying myself to them and then feeling the psychic pain of their changed opinions about me, of my not pleasing them any more. So I end up just attempting to shut those former authority figures out of my life. It's true that I could just give up on maintaining the now false image that they have of me in order to begin relating to them more honestly, but honestly, without the motive of pleasing them, I have nothing drawing me to them, nothing that I feel I have in common with them to share in a friendship. I'm not talking about anyone in particular, just the general sense of weariness that I get when confronted with the conflict of my past and present selves. I really just want to walk away from that former life and have nothing more to do with it, but I don't know how that would work if I want to heal the wounds received during that time. I can never fully walk away from what made me who I am today, from what brought me to this point. But in another sense, I am always walking away from my former self as I change and evolve a little bit each day.

Fuck, I think I got off track. Let's try starting again at a different point.

I'm tempted to consider whether, since this habit of soaking up the opinions and goals of my authority is so ingrained, I could use it to my benefit by carefully choosing who it is that I put on that pedestal and so become the person I want to be... by... becoming other people? Shit, that's a really stupid way to behave. And it's what I've been doing. All my life. No, I need to kick this habit, and I need to do it by being an ass. Well, not necessarily being an ass, but I'll definitely be feeling like one. Instead of soaking authority figures up, I need to purposefully put them off. My mom describes my people pleasing behavior in terms of seeking peace at all costs. I avoid conflict by anticipating what those I would conflict with want and preemptively giving them that. So I simply need to get more comfortable with being in conflict with other people.

Simply. heh.

Tags:

• unschooling
• rewilding

I've had a mental block against writing for a while which I think I'm about to come out of. I've been seeking an outlet lately, but I've not felt like I could say anything here. That seems to be a relatively common hurdle that I need to get over. I'm treating this blog as if it needs to be perfect. As much as I like to think so, I didn't leave behind my perfectionist side back in sophomore year. There's also the part about what I write here hurting people unintentionally. But I've got to remind myself, among others, that this blog is for my benefit primarily. It's a space I can use to sculpt my thoughts. I just happen to also find it useful to share those thoughts with everyone else, both as a broadcasting service and to receive feedback. I also tend to worry about whether I'm being too long-winded.

Well, I'm putting those concerns and worries aside because I have things to say and a place to say them, so I'm gonna. This post'll probably be mostly stream of consciousness-type stuff. I've got stuff I've got stored up from at least a month of writer's block. So here we go -

expand to read full post

We had a huge wind/thunderstorm here a little over two weeks ago. It knocked the electricity out for close to half a million people in the metro area for several days. That was lots of fun. Huge branches were downed in our backyard from a maple next door (the leaves from which jumpstarted the carbon portion of my compost pile), so it looked a little bit like a jungle. I loved having the air conditioning off and the lights off at night. I enjoyed time away from this addicting computer, spending more time than usual experiencing the world, unmediated by a screen. The one thing I did miss was free access to the refrigerator. We quickly got out and ate all the animal foods possible, so it's not like there was much in there that I was missing out on, but just not having that convenience of being able to look in the fridge whenever I wanted to became the biggest burden for me somehow. The one big loss from the storm personally was that the tent I had set up in the backyard broke. That was where I was sleeping most nights. The first two nights without power, I still slept outside, under the sky, on a full-length folded out lawn chair, where there was actually enough air movement that I was more comfortable than the people sleeping inside on beds. Nearly everyone cheered when the power finally came back on, 67 hours later. I didn't. I'll always cheer when the power goes out. It's good practice.

One of the weirdest things to come back to after Dancing Rabbit was indoor plumbing. Why shit in (somewhat) clean water when you could better use it to drink or to water a garden? And why flush away perfectly good shit when you could compost it and turn it into fertilizer? And then, when you go to squat on a toilet, there's the splash factor you have to worry about. And why is it necessary to pee inside? We train our dogs to go outside to do their business (actually, it's more like we train them to stay inside and then have to additionally train them to not mark the territory of where they've been trained to live), why can't humans?

At Dancing Rabbit, they have a humanure system set up, with composting toilets (buckets that you sprinkle sawdust in after you're done) and humey piles that cook in a compost pile for a year before they turn into usable soil. I really didn't want to turn the lever of any flush toilet ever again when I first got back, and with good reason. Within a week of returning home, a toilet I flushed overflowed, which was a big smelly mess. That toilet has since fallen into disrepair and my mom has spent many hours of frustration (with my help every once in a while)attempting to replace the innards of the tank contraption, and to no avail. I'd really rather shit in a bucket. Or even better, grab a shovel and head for some woods.


Just after I wrote the part about training dogs to go outside, our new family member, Emma, was let outside to poop. She's a 10 week old, six pound, beagle mix. She's the runt of the litter (the mom and dad live next door) and is very cute, soft, floppy. White with big brown blobs. So far, she's mostly been doing a good job of getting along with Lady, our 14 year old, 16 pound terrier. At first, I resisted getting attached to her because, generally, I don't like the idea of having pets. I love animals, but I don't want them domesticated when I'm trying to go feral myself. I've heard the philosophical argument made that humans keep pets to have someone to sympathize with their own cagedness. We generally treat pets as a lower caste of humans - keeping them locked up within boxes of various sizes, from the literal cage, to the backyard, to the leash around the neck. They're fed "food" that's even more bland and processed than human "food". They're trained with rewards and punishments exactly what's acceptable behavior, and when broken, lead even more tamed and boring lives than most of us live, looking forward only to the next opportunity to be rewarded or to get out of their most restrictive cage. Many, of course, grow to love their cages, finding them secure and comforting, just like every human I know. And of course, any animals that we take with us into the realm of civilization also have the corresponding population problems. And we sterilize many of them. I just finished reading Brave New World. I wonder if that's coming for humans. (And by coming, I mean coming back and expanding, because I'm aware that some humans have already been subjected to involuntary sterilizations. US citizens even. Before Hitler made eugenics unpopular. For a while anyway.)


I had another bubble of hope pop the other day. I was reading Ran's zine, Superweed 4. First, I should mention that Ran is still one of the people I've positioned as an authority figure to look up to, imitate, and please. In the zine, he's basically journaling during a wilderness bike trip, and by the end of it, he, someone who is strongly anti-civ, is sick of the wilderness and can't wait to get back to civilization. From there, he goes on to say that it'll be impossible for him to ever fully undomesticate himself. Civilization is his home, even as dysfunctional as it is, and he'll always be drawn back to it. The best he can hope for it to live on the fringes of civilization and try to get the best of both worlds. Since I put so much stock in what he says, this little part crushed my hopes of ever becoming a full-time hunter-gatherer. So without that naively cushioning hope beneath me anymore, I got pretty depressed and despairing for a little bit. I've got a quote from Radiohead as the "headline" for my myspace profile right now that fits the feeling - "your fantasies are unlikely. but beautiful." Despair is a hard emotion to feel, but in the end, it always ends up being more motivating than hope. Hope is passive; despair opens the door for action, since there's nothing to lose after all.

I watched a documentary ealier today, Modern Tribalism, which explores the sub-culture movement in modern society towards ritual practices very similar to those carried out by primitive cultures - primarily, tattooing, piercing, and festivals centered around a fire. When I was younger, I always said that I would never want to get a tattoo or a piercing. I wanted to keep my body "natural". Why would I want to improve upon what I was given by God? But as my friend George said, life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. Things like piercings and tattoos appeal to me now, not just as an act of rebellion. It's an act of belonging. It's an initiation rite, or a partial substitute for one, since there are no really good one's in this culture. The act of going through something painful can be a powerful tool for growing in strength and confidence as one transitions to a new stage in life. I'm certainly in such a transition right now.


Sara and I are in a really good place right now. I've realized that I don't really need to change the way I relate to her since she has always been my friend first and foremost and still is. And Sara has realized that the primary thing she was ending in our breakup was the use of labels - boyfriend and girlfriend. It's the status of being a couple that we gave up. And, really, I'm happier for it, and we're both healthier for it.

Well, healthier to a degree. I'm still very sick. Not physically, most of the time, but in every other way possible. Since I've begun this journey of healing, I've become very aware of exactly how I medicate and numb myself to protect me from reality. Lately, I've been eating more comfort food, which I don't even want to think about stopping since I'm underweight, but some of the food I eat still doesn't make me feel good afterwards. I rarely drink coffee (only when I go out with friends to a coffee shop like Mokabe's), but I want to cut it out completely. It certainly tastes good, but it makes me feel awful. And I definitely don't want to ever become dependent on that most used and abused drug in the world.

Speaking of coffee, the last day or so, I've been considering a job at a fancy coffee shop close to my neighborhood, called Belas Artes. I'd like to get a job in order to save up some money. I'd like to save up some money in order to travel to Europe with my friend Nathan in January. He's studying in Ireland for a semester, but he's visiting a friend in Bulgaria first and then has a month to get from one corner of Europe to the other, seeing as much of Europe in the meantime as possible. And I want to make that journey with him. I'm also planning to travel around to visit friends at college in Chicago and at Truman. And I'd like to go back up to Dancing Rabbit sometime this fall, maybe in conjunction with helping with the sorghum harvest at Sandhill Farm. When I'm at home, I'll be helping with house maintenance and renovations, possibly homeschooling/unschooling my brother, and unschooling myself - reading at will and learning some basic self-sufficiency skills. And I'll be continuing to heal. But that's a lifelong process.

Tags:

• collapse
• food
• rewilding
• civilization
• community
• work
• unschooling

Rewild.org

I'm not sure how long rewild.org has been offline now, but for my and others' convenience, I've reincarnated their website with the help of the internet archive and google pages. You can find the site's text, as it appeared as of it's last archive snapshot - March 8, 2005 - here. My link in the sidebar to rewild will now point there as well. I hope the people who ran rewild.org are doing well.

Tags:

• rewilding
• meta

Sara

I am carefully tearing apart my old life, my old way of living. I am changing. I have been changing. I change. I say "carefully" as if I'm in control, but I am most certainly not. I can take the first step on a lot of things, but after that, I don't know where the path I stepped down is going to take me. And even that first step is only possible within the specific context of a lot of outside factors. And sometimes, I don't even get to make that first step for myself. Sometimes, I'm following someone else's lead.

expand to read full post

That happens to be the case for this one particular change. Sara and I broke up. It was at the beginning of our second week at Dancing Rabbit, which means that it's been a little over a month now since it happened. I don't want to go into the whole story here, but feel free to ask me about it one-on-one. Neither Sara nor I are completely whole and healthy, and our being together was essentially insulating ourselves from that reality. I know that in my case, I have been changing so much that I don't really know who "me" is. I've spent a lot of time peeling away the facade I wore throughout my adolescence and simply replacing it with other superficial things. I don't know what my core is. I don't know what a core even looks like. I know I must have one, but I have so many layers of defense mechanisms and insecurities put up around it that I don't know how to split through those to find myself again. So that's basically the purpose of our break up. We are still good friends (which is something I don't know how to really do yet, but I'm letting myself go with the flow, as it is). I am grateful to Sara for initiating this opportunity for growth. I never would have done it. I was way too comfortable. (There are other, more fucked up reasons why I never would have done it, but I don't feel like going into those here, yet).

I guess I should let you know that I did not take the break up as well as I'm showing myself to have here. I have already gone through a lot of emotional angst, followed by attempts at numbing myself, and then more angst (to greatly simplify the pattern of behavior). I've grieved sufficiently for now and am pretty okay with where Sara and I are in relation to each other, but it's taken a month to get at least this far. I'm excited about the unknown future.

More on that "tomorrow."

Tags:

• community

A quick overview of my time at DR

I miss being at Dancing Rabbit.

I miss the clean air, being outside, surrounded by mostly untamed (if recovering) wilderness, walking barefoot everywhere, swimming in the pond daily (sometimes twice), the stars, the fireflies, the food. I miss the culture of openness and honesty, of egality, of body freedom. I miss the land and the rabbits (real ones, hopping all over the place). I don't really miss the ticks. Well, I kind of do.

expand to read full post

It was a very simple and enjoyable life that I had there for those three weeks. I had the space and freedom to be myself without anyone giving me funny looks. Women needn't shave, and men needn't wear pants (skirts and dresses are not uncommon for both genders)... I fit right in! Sort of.

There are some things that I don't particularly like about Dancing Rabbit. They are an eco-village and they intend to grow as big as one (500 people). They are by no means a tribe. A tribe could form within the village, but I don't know how likely that would be. They are also out to save the world, which is more just an annoyance from my standpoint. But their method of doing so, as shortsighted as it is, is to model to "mainstream society" (a very common phrase heard at DR) a more sustainable way of living, but one that isn't so drastically different that people from the outside world automatically think that they couldn't do it.

Dancing Rabbit is off the power grid (all electricity is from solar panels and wind turbines) and mostly off the water grid (via filtered roof runoff). They use only sustainably harvested lumber. Members cannot have personal vehicles on the property. Buildings are often built with strawbales or cob. They grow most of their fruits and veggies (and buy all the rest of their food in bulk from an organic supplier). And they're trying to restore the rest of their burned out ex-farmland to its pre-civilized state. That's what they're modelling to the world as what will save it. Somehow. As if the world needs saving. There's a lot of issues with purity and guilt there. They've got a bit of the puritan work ethic going on, too.

I'll go into more of what I took away from DR and what I'm thinking (right now) about the future later. My life is in transition and upheaval, which makes it exciting (read scary) but hard to think all that clearly. But more on that tomorrow.

Tags:

• ecology
• community
• civilization

Back in the land of flush toilets

I am finished with my visit to Dancing Rabbit. I've been visiting with my friends, Nathan and Lacy. I'll be back home tomorrow night. Lots to say, but I don't have the time, energy, or distance, yet. But I'm sure that if you check back in a few days, you'll get an eye-full. For now, you can go read my new friend, Brillo's account of his time at DR.

Tags:

• community
• civilization
• meta

Summer

I finished with school about two weeks ago. At first, my family and I spent our time in a mad rush to get the house clean before Sara got home from Europe, which she did monday before last. We got to a point where at least everyone had a place to sleep (I have not had a bed when I came home all school year). Sara spent a few days here decompressing from her travels before heading to her family's house for a week. So I've been busy with having Sara home, after having been apart for a very long (and very short at the same time) four months. Which is just an excellent use of time in my opinion.

expand to read full post

Once she headed to her family a couple days ago, I finally started moving on some things I want to begin doing. I'm doing my best to recover from at least 5 or 6 years of sleep deprivation. I'm avoiding the ever-whistling television as much as possible and spending as much time as possible outside, enjoying my wonderfully unkempt backyard. I've watched another awesome movie, My Dinner with Andre, which my dad got for me from the library. I've also been bookshopping a lot, mostly at a small bookstore on south Grand called Dunaway, but also at Borders to get rid of graduation gift cards I still had. I picked up the screenplay of the above movie, which I know I'll enjoy reading in the future. I also got a field guide for wild edible plants. I've been occasionally snacking on little yellow flowers in my backyard, and now I know that they're clover sorrel. They have a nice sweet, but biting, taste. I also tried my first dandelion flower and greens sunday, and I also had a bunch of wild strawberries (which admittedly seemed to be simply crunchy packets of water).

I went grocery shopping both for the family and for myself a couple days ago. For my food, I'm trying out a lot of things that Ran suggests in his Advice page. I'm experimenting right now with catching wild yeast to make my own sourdough bread. I'd also like to learn to sprout grains. I went to a health food and supplement store called New Dawn (also near south Grand) where I spent too much money. To get an idea of what I bought, I'll say what I ate throughout the day yesterday. For breakfast, I had an orange and a banana with some Smuckers "natural" chunky peanut butter and some organic green tea. A couple hours later, I learned to make scrambled eggs (isn't that sad- that I have to learn to make scrambled eggs!), made with cage-free eggs (from Schnucks- so I would guess that they're still crowded in a warehouse, just not in cages). Then I had a peanut butter sandwich on Ezekiel brand (sprouted) wheat bread. And an apple. And then spaghetti and tomato sauce, both organic.

I want to try buying food in larger quantities from Jay's international grocery, but I've never been there and have no clue as to what the quality of the food is there. Since I'm not making any kind of income right now, I really feel entitled to nothing. So I'm trying to learn to live on as little money as possible. I went dumpstering for only the second time this past saturday, at Soulard farmer's market. That's another place to shop in the future instead of a huge supermarket. I want to start gardening in the backyard (I hope it's not too late for everything at this point), and I want to start composting. I'd really like to start filtering the tap water because I don't like what I've learned about it's quality. At this point I'm just setting my drinking water out in an open container for a day or so before I drink it to de-chlorinate it.

There's a lot I want to start doing but I'm prevented right now by the fact that I'm leaving for Dancing Rabbit in less than a week. I'll be leaving for that monday morning with Sara and Devin, and I'll be there for the next three weeks, without any contact with a computer if I can help it. So, basically I'll be back in july to tell you all about it.

Tags:

• food
• simplicity
• work