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.
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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.
Thanks for such an open post. That's what I really love about sites like yours: that you let us right in on your process. Fight Club and The Drama of the Gifted Child both admonish the audience "not to go to their cave." Like when Tyler poured the acid on the back of Edward Norton's hand, and Edward Norton wanted to just numb out, to disassociate by going to his "happy place." The underlying message is that we are all guilty of doing that--that we recoil from walking through whatever it is we're feeling. Tyler demands that Edward Norton stay present. Alice Miller indicts us for the same thing, but shows us why we ever began doing it in the first place.
ReplyDeletethanks casemeau for pointing out that connection.
ReplyDeleteand thanks sushil for sharing your thoughts. i like a lot of what you have to say. although i don't want to just go back to an agrarian lifestyle. a lot of your points remain valid if applied to hunter/gatherer societies. your description of "sustainable" life being repetitive and unchanging does not sound attractive however. hunter/gatherers only "worked" for maybe 3 hours a day, gathering their food, and the rest of the time they had free to play. where does that fit in with your "humans must work constantly" arguement? thanks again for sharing your thoughts.