I’ve felt frustrated lately; I want to accomplish things that don’t seem to come fast enough. I want things to happen that…haven’t. I talk with people who I want to respond in a certain way that…don’t. I’ve felt this building feeling of stressed impatience. And so, last night I watched a french swashbuckling movie, in which a swordmaster, instructing his students said:

Fencing is a conversation between arms.

My ears perked up, and I came back to myself a little bit.

This feeling of conversation - and I do mean “feeling”, like the feelings of softness, or hardness, or a swaying motion, or tension, or relaxed calm, for me “conversation” describes a real feeling - carries such an enlivening power.

I can sense back-and-forth in there, an exchange, but even more so - a sensitivity. What you say, I allow it to change me. And what I say, you allow it to change you. I feel interested and open, as do you. When aggression, or a loss of sensitivity, or a loss of generosity, enters the picture, the conversation transforms to discussion, or a debate, or even an argument.

This reminds me of Martín Prechtel’s discrimination between courtship and seduction - one has no agenda except experiencing a relationship, the other has a strongly felt agenda.

How many conversations happen in political life nowadays? I see none. Zero. They’ve completely left.

And therefore, how many politicians that I know of, knowing their current behavior, would I freely allow in my living room? Maybe 1. Probably none.

But what about me? Have I kept close to this commitment of conversation?

I begin to go down the list of everything in my life - did I make that a conversation? Did I make this a conversation? I’m hearing a lot of “no’s” in response.

This reminds me of becoming traditional. I keep needing to come back to the world as a conversation, because I’m never done with the conversation, and the human-made modern landscape contains a lot of well-crafted distraction from it. Conversations don’t increase profits, I suppose.

Everything honest feels like a conversation. Why “honest”? I don’t mean a valuation of “good” or “bad”, but I suppose I mean, with full awareness, perceiving the other’s personhood, with no hidden agendas, no deflection of responsibility. Or, in any case, to the extent that a humble adult can do such a thing nowadays.

I bless your conversations, all of you.

You may not be aware of a major new project I’m working on; the non-profit Language Hunters organization.

This holiday season we’re fundraising on kickstarter to complete our Irish Language Hunt project - a series of language game videos that simultaneously documents and teaches the endangered Irish language.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/242604490/irish-language-hunt

By doing this we’re working on a model usable by anyone working in language revitalization; the ability to rapidly learn, teach, and document, via video and audio, the languages that are the soul of our families, communties, and identities. The words and songs that weave our lives into wholeness.

This holiday season please support this ground-breaking work we’re doing.

“Some tell me that what I say is true but that I only point out a problem and offer no solution. This is because they cannot give themselves to the solution that is made obvious by how I describe the problem. Tell me, if you are not willing to confess our part in these things and be broken hearted about it, what makes you think you are willing to do something more when you are not willing to do this least of things? I ask  you to confess and be broken hearted. If you will not do this, there is no point in saying more.”  - Chapter 3, page 79, Growing Up in Occupied America.

I’ve just finished the third reading of author and nomadic permaculturalist Finisia Medrano’s book, Growing Up in Occupied America - a book both born of our culture, and leading beyond it, at times laugh out loud funny, at others heart-breaking, inspiring, and unnerving.

Some know Finisia also as “tranny granny”, due to her physically and spiritually straddling the worlds of male and female.  I’ve known of Finisia for a long time, though I’ve never met her. She holds a heroic space for me, nomadically tending the original wild-food-abundant land in places where most would see only desert of the Great Basin and beyond. For this reason, romanticizing her comes easy to me - she does feel like a coyote constantly circling camp from a distance. And  yet I know romanticizing marks the spoor of the monstrous epidemic of disconnection, romanticizing with one hand while ostracizing in the other. So let’s keep Finisia human.

In her book, she tells a very human story. The first half she dedicates to telling some of her life story, segueing into writings during her time in a Utah jail cell. Her writing reminds me of Tom Brown, Jr.’s (whose father preached in his family’s local church) -  clear, urgent and evangelical, and at the same time lost, vulnerable and despairing.

The Christian story may not move me much (consciously anyway), though I know for my parents, grand-parents, and ancestors it played a large role, but secular puritanism still plays a massive (though diminishing) role in my life. Though there are certainly folks my age who identify as Christian and struggle to keep that way flourishing, I’ve woven a story in my mind of a slow cultural transition to a different kind of guiding story through the generations, as grand-parents gave birth to parents and them to me. Our story continues to change into something more rooted, more about belonging here, and less about waiting for home to find us. For Christians, they may look for their home in heaven. For modern non-Christians, they look for much the same; they may look for hope in the Singularity, or Star Trek, or “evolving to the next level of human consciousness”.

Christian or not, our culture loves to look anywhere but here for peace, meaning, belonging.

So Finisia straddles these stories too, having gone from childhood atheism to adult Christianity to the blended story that guides her now.  This story-travel embodies much of what Finisia has to offer - a way of getting from one culture to another, of rethinking of our relationship to civilization and the land.

Finisia talks a lot about the Christian story in her book, holding it close, rejecting it in disgust, seeing it freshly. Cain, the farmer and city-builder, murdering Abel the pastoralist hunter-gatherer across the millenia and across continents.

She also offers the simple reality of planting back the land with wild foods, falling in love with green growing relatives like the biscuit roots, camas, wild onions, pinõn. She offers the innately human rhythm of wandering across what she calls the “hoop”, the seasonal migration according to plant harvest times, climate, altitude. She reminds us that our mothering earth hurts terribly in our spiritual and physical absence, missing us, needing us to replant the places that ranching, agriculture, and backcountry recreation have destroyed or degraded.

I don’t “agree” with everything Finisia has to say; I don’t read books to “agree” with people. I don’t work in the “agreeing” business. I listen to stories, and tell my own. And Finisia’s story - ballsy, accusatory, comical, threatening, cajoling, inspiring, heartbreaking, grounded - moved me, inspired me, and left me wanting more.

You can find her book at Lulu.com -  I highly recommend it, and all the proceeds go to support Finisia and the work she does. Read it, and tell your friends to read it.  Especially the brave, fierce friends looking for more out of life.

I’d also to specially thank Seda Joseph Saine, the editor, for keeping the flame burning and making sure such a wonderful book got published.

I recently attended the Gamestorm convention here in the Portland, OR area, and with the help of Joel and Will, had the chance to experiment.

As some of you may know, I’m a big fan of Matthijs Holter’s quiet, simple story game Archipelago II. I told a friend recently that I believe all story games are “hacks” of Archipelago. This is of course ridiculous, and absolutely true in a totally false way.

Archipelago presents a simple structure to navigate scene-by-scene storyjamming. I’ve hacked it myself to make it even friendlier to new players, for example by adding the “help” ritual phrase, and by adding hand signs.

One other change that I find absolutely essential is the “I See You” collaborative character generation process. This is described elsewhere.  I’ve been dissatisfied with it up til recently - at Gamestorm I tried a new experiment and it came off wonderfully. I’ve noticed too, that often “I See You” is my favorite part of the game. So I had a thought…

What if the whole game had the same essential structure as “I See You”?

This is such a fundamental change, that I feel comfortable admitting that I’ve drifted the original Archipelago game enough that I need to start calling it something else. So I’m now officially working on “Songline”, a game for storyjamming in the modern mythtime.

It has a setting, absolutely, because though generic games (like Archipelago) have their own charm, they also can leave players adrift. The setting is where the modern world overlaps with the deeper world. It’s about the places you find in your dreams, like when you discover an extra door off the kitchen that you’ve never noticed before, and it takes you somewhere totally…other.

It’s about how the deeply, fundamentally magical world can survive in spite of the absolute plundering of its body and soul.

My goal is to reliably, consistently, pull storyjammers into a deeply satisfying place. Not because they’re skilled, or because the group is already experienced, or because we just got lucky this time. I want this to be the experience the game delivers - quiet, raw, reflective depths.

This is of course all part of my quest to make family storytelling an accessible, vital activity, and a functional alternative to pop television, movies, and written fiction.

If you hadn’t guessed, the “Where Are Your Keys?” game design system is absolutely guiding my hand in this. I continually remind myself to keep following the fundamental principle: “obviously!”

Joe McDaldno, host of the Kootenay Co-op Radio show “The Stories We Tell”, and a blogger at Buried Without Ceremony, interviewed me recently on most of my favorite topics - indigenous language, language revitalization, and rewilding.

Give it a listen!

I recently had the opportunity to jam story using the Archipelago story game, written by Matthijs Holter. We played two sessions over two nights.

I still endeavor to introduce storyjamming to players who have never done it before. I believe collaborative storytelling can really enrich anyone’s life, and make more personally relevant stories than Hollywood or other media. I had at least five players who had never played a “story game” before, for a total of 8 players (!!).

I always have an experiment going for every game I run. Most importantly, I want every step of game play to feel like fun, including “learning the rules”. To maximize fun and most quickly learn the fundaments of game play, I have an array of tools I use.

In the past, I had a series of warm-up games I consistently used, specifically (in this order) “Firing Line”, “One Word at a Time”, “Color, Advance”, and “I see you”. These games have a downside in that they don’t necessarily relate directly to the setting or story, unless you have a creative way to make them relevant. I’ve gotten positive feedback from players, but still I want every moment of play to contribute to the shared story.

I love Archipelago because the ritual phrases offer an alternative way to ease into a game and gain confidence setting scenes (such as “Try a different way”, “More details”, “That won’t be so easy”).

I realized that most importantly to me, I want new players to feel confident and comfortable creating fiction; in the back of Archipelago Matthijs lists several principles of good Archipelago play (such as “Yes, and…” and “Accept input”).

I made five major decisions to accelerate play, group cohesion, confidence in contributing in the shared fiction, and learning the “rules” of Archipelago.

First, I gave all the ritual phrases hand signs (taken from ASL), that made it easier and gentler to interrupt another player’s flow to get “more details” or “try things differently”, and modeled memorably using the ritual phrases.

Second, I created two other ritual phrases, “Help”, to support the “Ask for input” principle. New players don’t know how to quickly get rescued from a creative block, and tend to freeze up and stress out. “Help” worked amazingly; everyone had an easy out, all they had to do was make the ASL hand sign  for “Help” and other players jumped in to rescue the moment. Also, I used the ASL hand-sign “Finish” to indicate the end of scene.

Third, I ran “I see you” for everyone’s character. All the players remarked on how vivid their shared vision of each other became. They really enjoyed this part. Formerly stereotyped, cardboard characters became rich and mysterious, everyone wondering how they would fare in the story. Already interesting characters acquired even more depth.

Fourth, instead of a destiny “statement”, we all created destiny “loaded questions” to answer, and per the rules, once answered, that character’s story finished. I did this inspired by the Jason Morningstar and Matthijs Holter partnership Archipelago games “Last Train Out of Warsaw” and “Love in the Time of Seith”. The players really loved this too; it really heightened the mystery and anticipation of the game to an extraordinary degree.

Five, I allowed “secondary players”, much like the Moons in Ben Lehman’s “Polaris”, that had no role other than to play bit parts and help with the setting. The WAYK game’s “Lunatic Fringe” technique inspired this. I also allowed “paired” character ownership, so that players could tag team for one character and retain a lot of energy and comfort with play.

Things I’d change for next time:

Less characters, more secondary players.

Each player can choose more than one destiny “loaded question”; players had a difficult time choosing one due to the rich variety of questions that other players wrote, so why limit it?

Change the process of “I See You”; rather than saying “I don’t see it” and ending the game, use Archipelago’s “Try something different” and keep going. Go two or three rounds around the table, until the player says “Finished”.

Because of my recent radical change in how I make my living, I have now arrived at the extreme end of the philosophy that I began toying with over a decade now. When I first began learning traditional living skills and native-to-place relationships (at the time, at Tom Brown’s Tracker School, back in 1995), I thought language had little or nothing to do with this path. I saw the work on this path consisting of action, not talk. Skills, not discussion. A knife carving into wood, an antler point twisting flakes off the edge of an obsidian flake, not conversation and reflection (and music, and feasting, but more on that for another time).

Cognitive scientists are more and more confirming the everyday empirical evidence accumulated by anyone paying attention; that how we talk about things drives how we think about things. What you won’t hear from scientists quite yet, but I will happily share, concerns the everyday practicality of language. If we can talk about a thing (say, tracking) easily, we can collaborate on it and improve it easily. If we can only talk about a thing with difficulty, we will collaborate and improve with difficulty. Anyone who has ever improvised a technical jargon for a hobby or past-time knows this.

Yet this understanding doesn’t just apply to new coinings for particular tools or methods for niche activities (say, the equipment and techniques necessary for paragliding). This doesn’t just involve technical jargons, but our ability to talk about the world in useful ways.

How we talk about time, space, agency, roles, and relationships, in modern languages such as Chinese, English, French, Russian - does this support richer lives, on a human (rather than industrial or hierarchical) scale? Does this help us understand root causes of social problems, and move towards healing? How does the Hopi concept of Manifested/Unmanifested time, for example, change the richness of relationships in human/wild communities, as opposed to the Indo-European concept of Past/Present/Future?

When I say “richness”, I mean viable human wealth, not the material kind, but the kind that sustains generations of human beings in a web of relatedness to the living community around them.

You can imagine the implications of losing over half the world’s remaining 7000 languages within the  century, as you think about these issues.

A skilled flintknapper can make amazing lithic tools, such as arrowheads, every bit as beautiful as one you would find still anciently lying in the earth. Yet the language for speaking about this act, making that arrowhead, and giving it as a gift for the food of the animal’s body, we cannot reproduce in English, without tremendous insight and effort.

I don’t say it cannot be done (neither Edward Sapir nor Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed the misnamed Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, crafted by linguists in the mid-twentieth century, proposing that language limits thinking; rather they believed that language drives and powerfully influences our ability to think about the world). Instead, I say our language provides an enormous impediment for us to wrestle it into saying something meaningful, against the coding of all its grammar and idiom. It wants us to think (and therefore do) what will perpetuate and generate the world we see - the “civilized world”.

Don’t waste my time. The past is the past. We are all one.  Be a winner, don’t be a loser. Let’s evolve to the next stage of human progress.

What on earth do these things even mean? Note how you can barely tell whether a Christian fundamentalist, a Buddhist, or a pagan New-Ager said these things. I stand in awe of the ability of English (and other modern languages) to keep us thinking the same old things, revolution after revolution.

At the very least, we have a tremendous amount to learn from non-Indo-european (and non-”civilized”) languages, in order to wrestle these issues in our modern mother tongues. Indigenous languages represent an unbroken tradition of human brilliance (what did indigenous “rocket scientist”-type minds do 30,000 years ago? or today, in the indigenous communities where they still live? certainly not just build a more effective friction fire kit, or knap a better arrowhead, but far more than our modern minds can imagine).

For this reason, I’ve dedicated my adult life to helping revitalize endangered languages.  Along with my partner in this endeavor, I’ve made it my goal to turn around the world endangered language crisis within the decade. I look forward to the day when I can turn my attention to other issues, but for now, I can’t imagine more important work than the work of helping to revitalize the indigenous soul, around the world.

As I continue to work on having useful, rich conversations and make relevant discriminations between this and that, I’ve come across yet another poverty-stricken aspect of the modern English language: “intelligence”, our ability to talk about the capacity of human beings to move through the world competently and with bright questing minds.

In the culture of the I.Q. test, and owing to the amount of times government agents (also known as teachers) have analyzed and judged us, it doesn’t surprise me that we have such a poor vocabulary for speaking about this subject usefully.

Most folks with some amount of curiosity have come to the conclusion, at least, that humans can have multiple forms of intelligence. Musical, Emotional, Spatial, Mathematical, Linguistic, Kinesthetic, and many more, surely.

And yet at the core of this discrimination of intelligence, we continue to call some folks dumb (whether mathematically, or otherwise), and some folks smart.

I think this discrimination still fails to usefully talk about this issue.

As I continue to work with the “Where Are Your Keys?” community mentoring tools, and play (in language) with hundreds of people, of varying ages and temperaments, in a highly structured environment, for hundreds of hours, I have begun to feel I have enough useful observations to put together a way of looking at intelligence that I can actually apply to my life, and accrue benefit from.

I no longer believe in multiple intelligences; I’ve seen too many linguists struggle with the language game to believe in that simplistic explanation. Something else sits at the core of what it means to have a bright, questing mind, and the ability to quickly absorb new understandings.

I believe it comes down to “willingness”. Or even better, let’s capitalize it: “Willingness”.

“Willingness”, as I intend to coin the term, means the willingness of a human being to move. I mean movement in every possible dimension - emotional, physical, mental and more.

By moving my mind, my body, my emotions, my social environment, my values, my voice, I quickly absorb new skills as they map onto me in all those dimensions.

This to me further illuminates the danger of fundamentalism in any sphere. I may “believe” in the collapse of civilization, the fundamental insanity of industrial culture, the wisdom and vitality of traditional/primitive living skills, all things that one could argue a curious, aware person would begin to observe, but if my “belief” causes me to fix a position, or become rigid in my “correctness” and “rightness”, and see these things as unchanging, unarguable truths…

Well…

Then I’ve ceased to move, haven’t I?

I believe modern culture, especially as articulated by its recent apologists and thinkers such as Aristotle (yes, Aristotle came late to the scene of civilized endeavor - the memes existed long before him), believes the world is most safe, most sane, most successful, when it  appears unchanging, carved from marble, easily categorizable, and behind glass. Like meat in a butcher’s case, or a courtroom, or a man in uniform.

To me, however, these characteristics indicate a society at its most unstable, its most traumatized, its most fragile and desperate. Though folks like Aristotle believe that the world contains countless objects with unchanging essences (plumbers, politicians, sentient beings, unsentient beings, supposed “dead matter” such as rocks and stars and water), the empirical (and to many professional scientists at this time in history, the “scientific”) preponderance of evidence points to a world in a flux, where nothing “is” as it seems.

To live in accord with this dynamic flux, means to “move”.

A mind (and a body, and a heart, and so on…) willing to move in accord with this dynamic flux, will most readily adapt and thrive. A mind that moves a certain amount, if willing to move even more, will thrive yet more.

The willingness to move, not the movement itself, indicates intelligence. The movement of yesterday may not match the moving universe today.

So, friends and readers, I encourage you keep moving, keep looking, keep dancing, keep talking, keep listening. Share your insights with each other.

We’ll all get there together.

I always push for folks to begin seeing their world (I almost said “the world”, but the point being, that doesn’t exist!) as very a personal, unique story told from their perspective.

This begs the question - “well, what other stories await to add to mine?”, to begin filling in the communal puzzle of our-story-together (as a family, and as a culture), creating a Story, begging all the Big Stories of other peoples to be added to our own, not contradicting, but enriching each other.

Roles don’t comprise reality. What-actually-happens, to you or someone else, makes up “reality”. In an intact culture, Roles help us navigate reality. In a toxic culture, they replace reality, acting as a shield against what-we-actually-experience. They begin to “mis-map” our experience into bizarre prescriptive (”you should behave this way…”) models of relationships.

You are [sic] not the Teacher, and I am [sic] not the Student. You are [sic] not a Woman, and I am [sic] not a Man.  You may move through the world woman-ing, and I may do manly things, and we may enrich these roles and express them in a healthy way, but at core our bodies move in a dazzling, thundering, dynamic storm of circulating desire for the other-than-us, with potentials and predispositions, but nothing hammered down or definite.

I believe healthy, lightly-held roles make this whirling chaos of yearning more navigable, but they do not replace it. I feel fine to have chosen my version of the role of “man”, but it does not eclipse that one can pick from an infinite array of gender roles. Truly one must pity a culture reduced to the poverty of choosing from “he, she, and it”. He, she, and it? Really? Wow.

You understand I don’t have a terrible amount of confidence in the culture of science, but it still feels satisfying to hear scientists speak to this. I like to think that a culture of inquiry who, in theory, values what they observe more than what they want to see, will sooner or later cross paths with my own thinking, and bring to the table their own eloquence. To wit:

From Alternet.org, “Why Are We Often Terrified of Our Own Sexuality” by Michael Ventura:

Alice Dreger is professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. This summer, on August 21, during the controversy over whether South African runner Caster Semenya was a man or a woman, Dreger published an essay in The New York Times in which she stated: “The biology of sex is a lot more complicated than the average [person] believes.”…Dreger informs us that there exists no scientific test to determine whether a person is, finally and definitely, female or male!

…When I discussed this essay with an especially well-informed shrink friend whom we’ll call Zachariah, he said, “The fear of encountering one’s in-betweenness in the sexual trance is probably the least discussed aspect of sexuality. The secret of sex is that sense of the free-floatingness and boundarylessness of it, the way you float through the boundaries of male and female, the unpredictability of it. Sex remains a mystery because of this shape-shifting quality.”…

…There’s no fixed place in the realm of the senses — no “there” there. What you know changes every time you go into it. As was told me once by a woman whom we’ll call Zia, “There are things you have to learn all over again, every night.”…

…Sexuality is scary because it’s where we meet ourselves most directly, without filters, without verbiage, and, if we go far enough, without fixed roles. It’s where we meet ourselves with and through the Other — this Other with whom we journey into the realm; this Other, a partner as fluid we are…

…Sex is scary the way the sea is scary, the way a storm is scary — because it’s elemental, and, as in all great elemental things, the same qualities that make it so powerfully beautiful can make it powerfully frightening.

Huh. Just like the rest of our world.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here, hasn’t it?

I’ve been busy with my new project; partnering with Evan Gardner on the “Where Are Your Keys?” (WAYK) language revitalization system.

If you’re a regular here, you know my love and respect for indigenous, animist languages. So you can imagine why the opportunity to completely turn around the world crisis of dying languages, within the decade, would captivate me.

“Where Are Your Keys?”, LLC, is a severely underfunded not-for-profit social enterprise dedicated to accomplishing this 10 year turn-around. With the paradigm shift of the Fluency Revolution, and the contagiousness play of the WAYK mentoring language, we believe this can be done.

But the clock only starts once we have sufficient funding. Help Evan and I focus on WAYK full-time, and bring the tools to communities who need them. We are looking for grantors, and like-minded angel investors to accomplish this.

Also, please attend and spread the word about the WAYK Save Your Language conference in Vancouver, B.C., on June 5th and 6th. Deadline for registration is June 1st!

Amidst all the environmental and cultural tragedy of this century and the last, we believe we have some really good news. We can help communities reclaim their traditions. We can bring languages back from the brink. We can help turn the tragic destinies of so much indigenous cultural wealth around.

Let’s start the clock on that decade of turn-around right now.

Contact me, Willem Larsen, for more information on how you can help:

mythic.cartographer@gmail.com

From a Open Space Gathering run by Chris Corrigan for First Nation folks in Alaska:

You’ve got to admire that. I mean really.

…or you’ll have me to deal with!

Recently I ran across a profoundly disturbing piece of science journalism regarding new observations of the teenaged brain. Read it, then come back here.

What offends me, exactly?  The part that no one notices - the part that people of the modern culture, especially (as far as I know) here in the USA, perpetuate without thought: the totally biased “scientific” interpretation (but perfectly accurate in terms of our cultural myths) on top of the actual observation of the teenage brain; though Teen brains may indeed not possess myelin sheaths that adults brains have, that doesn’t make them “unfinished”, in the sense that the article portrays: foolish, flawed, poor decision makers.

Without Teen’s “unfinished” brains 99% of the risk taking done in the name of love, art, idealism, adventure, protecting family, would disappear.

Teens excel at taking risks because they have perfectly developed brains for doing so.

Saying they have unfinished brains compares to saying a new moon hasn’t “finished” until it swells to a full moon. The Teen brain marks one moment in the cycle of the brains life where it has enormous potential for one kind of behavior - risk taking, adventure, romantic expression.

Think about this. Every moment of a human body’s life, the forces of life have demanded they produce vitality and excellence for all the humans in the social group. As natural people, belonging to family and land, we don’t “tolerate” the “slow development” of the teenage brain. We require teenagers to have fully intelligent minds, with just a little bit of crazy, to test the boundaries of our culture - to take risks, act like fools for love, to do everything that sober adults can’t do (without taking a deep breath).

It adds an extra layer to note that adults of the modern world (who belong to the culture of the above article) simultaneously want to consume teens (sexual exploitation, pop entertainment, using them to fuel our wars) along with demonizing, judging (like the neuroscientist in the article) and controlling them (oppressive schooling environments, curfews, etc.).

There would be no war in the world if it wasn’t for the teenage brain; and yet who runs those wars? Old men, adults. I don’t see the article explaining that part…

It’s awfully convenient to pin foolish behaviors on teens.

Every stage of a single person’s life creates Life for everyone around them, if they live it fully.

Children excel at Play, Teens excel at Risk, Adults excel at Providing, Elders excel at Story. The cycle never stops, it has no real beginning or endpoint. Without any one of these ripenings of human aspect, we would have never survived to the present. We would not exist. We require children, teens, adults, and elders to behave as they do for our very survival and vitality.

For those adults who look at children and see the inconvenience of playfulness, look at teens and feel threatened by their risky behavior, or look at elders and the ‘tiresomeness’ of their stories, I can only look at you and say:

Consider that if you haven’t done those things to your fullest ability, in your own time, then you haven’t lived.

Just because we live in a culture that worships gods of productivity and production, does not make such worship sane. To the extent that I did not play enough, or risk enough, I regret it. It has made me a smaller person.

Without a doubt, I do intend to make the most of my adult and elderhood. I only have the present moment to create the wealth of a well-lived life.

I’ve put this off for a long time. I once made the claim that I planned to say something that might possibly inspire feelings of hate towards me.

And then I got a bit scared and backed off from even saying it.

So, now I’ve given it its very own post, so that neither I, nor it, can hide. To wit:

Believing we “are one” [sic] has killed our souls as fierce, diverse, beautiful peoples.

Adhering to the annihilation of our diversity through all-consuming nationalities and hyper-evangelizing religions has smothered our wildness.

We need to narrow our sense of identity and belonging, down to the smallest and most human of scales.

We need to do this, because we need the “other”. We need the “not-us”. If we treat every stranger on the street as if they belong to that intimate circle of blood and village, than we leave ourselves wide open for abuse, consumption, enslavement. We also take away every opportunity for courtship, for ceremony, for sacredness and particularity of space and feeling.

The host needs a guest; the village needs the out-of-towners. To honor and welcome, to show off and out-do.

We need a human identity, not one married to a vast rapacious imperial corporation, that has created both the problem of the enemy nation “them”, and the solution of the national “we”, and the aw-shucks-what-can-we-do shrug at the need to consume the earth and everything beautiful to feed the slathering maw of that fiction.

As human beings, children of lineages that stretch back across great spans of time and trauma, we people a diversity. We do not belong to one “big love”. We belong to ourselves, our families, to the land that nourishes us, to the ineffable spark that enflames life.

We demonstrate our fierce and beautiful smallness, by welcoming strangers in our homes, into our villages, who don’t belong to our people, and for precisely that reason we can demonstrate how great a people the strangers have discovered.

If we can’t say who doesn’t belong, then our “welcome” doesn’t mean much.

We must identify with that which creates life; our unique nature, our family, our village of friends and families, however we arrive at that. And we must de-identify with the nation-state, with its politics of distraction, and begin to solve our own problems, so unique to our little group of families (or to our one little family), ourselves.

Maybe that doesn’t sound so bad, as I may have thought. We dwell in a crisis of identity; do we identify with the stories of Hollywood and the American nationalism (or pick your own country’s entertainment and governing fictions), or do we shrink our world down to right here, where life comes out of the ground, in this place, into the bodies, hearts, voices of our family and village.

Whether in the city, or the country, in an ecovillage on the dark side of the moon, or in the depths of a metropolis, we have a family, and we can create a village. We can do this by coming home to our true identity, something that only ever consisted of human and more-than-human relationships, real people that create life in each other. Not the imperial fiction that uses our allegiance as fuel to power the devouring of the world.

Discover your in-group, and then protect it fiercely; don’t let just anybody in, not without a fight, as any good village Grandmother will show you. Protect this in-group, so that then you can honor your out-group, the not-you.

Give up the “we are all one” religion. It has killed your soul. Let the diversity of peoples shatter oneness into countless billions of longings and courtship. Marry what you eat, court your neighbors, belong to yourselves and that which gives you life.

Tell your own stories, solve your own disputes. Identify with the life of your place.

Rewilding your eyesight means retraining your mind how to ride the wild willful ponies we call your “eyes”.

You, like me, probably learned as a child in school, and as an adult in the workplace, to tug at the reigns of your eyes, demanding (through squinting and staring) that they just see what you want them to see. Much like school and work demanded of you to ’snap to’ and do what they commanded you to do.

Learning to see, to ride those frisky, untame-able, przewalski’s ponies, really comes down to three things you’ll ask your eyes to do, and a whole lot of letting them do what they want to do.

These three things, in the beginning, you will practice separately, over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over…

I want to state first that I have myopia (nearsightedness), so that my descriptions will provide instructions specific to that kind of eyesight issue. You can apply this to presbyopia (farsightedness), but you’ll need to figure out how by yourself, for now. Now, the “things”:

Thing #1: Identify something that you do over and over anyway, that involves either sitting, standing or walking, with a view into the distance (i.e, not in a windowless room, but walking down a street, driving, working at a desk in front of a window, etc.).[aka the WAYK “Same Conversation”, for you smarty pants out there].

Thing #2: Broaden your vision to “wide-angle vision”.

[See the vision section of the sensory tune-up]

Thing #3: Look for the smallest detail in the distance, even if blurry and “impossible” to see.

Simple! It will never get any harder than this. It just takes time, and some other details and tiny wrinkles can accelerate the process, if you know about them, but you don’t need to. Wide-angle vision, and hunting for the smallest detail, in a consistently recurring familiar setting with a view of the distance, will do it all.

Of course, if you can learn it all just from this, you’ll impress me.

Next, in Part III, I’ll explain the step by step nature of the process.

We first learned how to see as babies. Then we learned how to not see, in school and in work, as we became adults. How do we rewild our eyesight?

Allow me to first retell my personal story of rewilding my eyesight.

As a child, I had normal, everyday, fantastic eyesight, no problem. I had a rich inner life, and a rich outer one too. Both of these lives felt in balance.

Then, at the age of 11, I moved from small-town Oregon to the big city, and started attending an inner-city middle-school in Portland, Oregon. Within a year my vision began markedly blurring. Within a couple years I couldn’t watch movies without glasses, and my inner life swelled out of all proportion, as my outer life shrunk to the size of a pea (or thereabouts).

Every year, my vision worsened, prescriptions strengthened. Immediately I distrusted the whole experience; the willingness of optometrists to write stronger and stronger prescriptions, the apparent helplessness of anyone to explain or remedy my worsening vision. My only role: to find eyeglass frames that didn’t look too ridiculous. A role which I failed at for years, I might add.

During high school I stumbled across Dr. William Bates’ “Bates Method” of vision therapy; though I couldn’t get it to “work” (and I struggled with doing the exercises consistently), I never forgot the hope of regaining my once fantastic, naturally perfect vision, that the “Bates’ Method’ offered.

I’ve spent a few hundred dollars on books, pinhole glasses, vision therapy kits, and so on, since. But the most useful money I ever spent, I spent at Tom Brown’s Tracker School, on a standard class, where he said:

“Folks, practicing wide-angle vision will not only increase your awareness remarkably, but some of my students have used it to regain their eyesight and throw away their glasses.”

Pretty much everything else I have to say stems from this simple, throwaway claim. If you don’t know what I mean by wide-angle (or “peripheral”) vision, I’ll explain more of this later. For now, know that it means just “seeing things out of the corner of your eye” - all the time!

“But, I’m specially broken…”

I thought this for years, that my loss of eyesight would resist any attempts to regain it, that I had special problems somehow not addressed by the various programs. Let me go through some objections you may have.

Objection #1: What if my vision “is specially broken”?

I don’t know. I thought this too. Mine recovered. Why not yours?

Objection #2: But I’ve had glasses since the age of two. I don’t have any great vision to regain!

Maybe. Maybe you never had the chance to really learn how to see in the first place, due to the vagaries of modern diet and family life.

Objection #3: I don’t do well at following regimens and self-help stuff. What if it doesn’t work, and I lose patience?

Yeah, me neither. Yes, I worried about that too. And yet, now in my thirties (two decades after the problem began), I have begun to regain my formerly amazing vision.

You don’t want to “fix” your eyesight. You want to relearn how to see, and to rewild your vision.

More than anything else about how I’ve gone about regaining my vision, I love the fact that it has improved my visual awareness too. Not just acuity; but awareness!  Since it has involved retraining my ability to use my eyes, it has made me wonder if I will ever have to worry about presbyopia (old-age vision, the need for reading glasses, etc.) either. In fact, if vision really operates as a skill relating the mind to the eyes, for the rest of my life, my eyesight may just get better, and better, and better. Until I’m seeing stars with my naked eyes that would require a modern person to use a telescope. You’ve heard those stories of ancient astronomers (not astronauts! I mean native, indigenous star watchers), haven’t you? How did they see those stars?

I really think I’ve discovered how.

For only $99.95…

No, sorry. You won’t get it that easy. Or rather, you only get it by doing it the truly easy way. But you probably won’t like it. If I’ve learned anything, as I’ve begun working with a mentoring language that has shot my ability to learn and teach through the roof (and resulted in things like my eyesight improving at last), I’ve learned not to pretend that explaining something teaches it.

You’ll only learn to rewild and retrain your vision, by doing small easy things, one piece at a time.

My perfect vision hasn’t fully returned.

I describe my current vision level, as flashes of 20/20 vision that last from split seconds to several minutes, perhaps for a total of 30 minutes a day. In the dark, bad lighting, and unfamiliar situations, this total can nosedive. Keep in mind though, that (as I write this) winter currently reigns in Portland. Every summer, with full sunny, bright days, my vision takes the biggest leaps and bounds of improvements.

If I had to predict, I would guess that my vision, at the current rate, will fully improve by the end of this next summer, or the one after it, since good sunlight seems to play such a strong role. But I never stop training my vision, even in winter.

Okay, where do I start?

Start with a good “set-up”. Eat a rounded paleodiet (with fish oils, fermented foods, and so on), or close to it, or another nourishing tradition in accord with your body’s needs, not an ideology. Get to know your body’s needs. Get an allergy test, and avoid your food intolerances and allergies completely. Start exercising. Get your body healthy. Then the eyesight part will come much easier. My improved vision correlates overwhelmingly with my improved health.

I’ll speak more about the actual nitty-gritty of eyesight improvement practices in Part II.