Adults hold space for culture, raise children, provide food and shelter for each other, and make decisions together that they follow through on. What does all this mean in a rewilding context? What do rewilding adults look like? I explore this topic with some rather strong opinions, borne of bittersweet experiences. Rewilding Adulthood may just amount to the most challenging, terrifying, and important work we have to do, as people who rewild.

Jake Swamp: http://www.treeofpeace.org
Jon Young: http://www.jonyoung.info
Rewilding: http://www.rewild.info

For the series on rewilding and breaking the spell of the modern culture, look into Breaking the Spell, parts One (Rewilding), Two (Rewilding Your Ability to Reason), Three (Reality Therapy), Four (the Village Philosopher), Five (the College of the Round Table), Six (the Reason for Riddles), and Seven (the Wise Compass).

 

 Rewilding Adulthood: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

What does it mean to pay attention to Needs and Feelings, our own and others? Why do we characterize the most biologically tangible and real aspects of our human nature, as irrelevant and inconvenient? We explore this taboo inner universe in today’s podcast.

Julie Cramer: http://www.thebalancepoint.org

Morihei Ueshiba, Founder of Aikido: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morihei_Ueshiba

Nonviolent Communication (communcation centered on nonjudgemental observations of Needs and Feelings): http://www.cnvc.org/

 

 Needs and Feelings of the Human Animal: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Thanks to the current round of donations (Thank you again, Tony and Kate!), I’ve just switched over from a free podcasting host service that bogged down my site and gave a lot of error messages, on to a paid hosting service, Liberated Syndication.

I went back and edited the Odeo links out of all the podcasts, and replaced them with the new hosting service, as hyperlinks to the title of the particular podcast.

Thanks for your patience and ongoing support. Now that I have a new monthly archive bill added on to the other payments of domain hosting, equipment, and computer repair (don’t ask), I continue to really benefit from your donations.

In the future, I hope to podcast or post video of upcoming riddle workshops, dream interview circles, story jam roundtables, and such. If you’d like to see/hear these things, you know how to help!

As we move further along the path of personal clarity and rewilding, we may discover things that hold us back, such as concepts of ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’. In this episode I talk about finding better measures for evaluating the feedback the world gives us, to improve our relationships in real ways. I also talk about implications of making these changes, of abandoning judgement as a primary tool of relating, and how this will change the way we communicate.

 

 the Grave of Right and Wrong: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I don’t know if the following will make any sense to anybody. I’ve begun to put some pieces together for myself, but I might not yet articulate it well enough for others. On the off chance that it clicks for someone, I’ll go ahead and take the risk.

I want to underscore a point I made in the last article concerning disgust at civilization. To articulate an argument against something insane, means that you can encompass it in your logical system. That means that you dignify it as one of the reasoned choices available to a member of your culture, however much you argue against it. By arguing against it, you say a reasonable person may choose it - because, you want to change this person’s mind by using a reasoned argument. You see?

Even now, culturally, we have things that you “just don’t do”, no explanation needed, and we have things that we haven’t made our minds up about.

Furthermore, a sane and life-affirming choice needs no logical support - you can feel the evidence with your body’s senses. Only abstractions need logical support. The more removed the abstraction, the more support needed.

Once you’ve exposed a life-denying choice for all to see, to argue further in the face of someone choosing it means you consider their choice reasonable. Which means that you leave the door open for you to choose it, someday, as a reasonable thing.

To reject something, without explanation or articulation, marks a step into a world where you can move directly into remedy, if you yourself end up choosing it. At that point, everyone in your micro-culture knows you “just don’t do that”. And in rewilding, everyone knows that punishment doesn’t address the actual issues at stake. So everyone moves directly into remedy.

The more of your rewilding culture that, once accepted on the basis of life-affirming evidence, you no longer articulate in a reasoned argument, the stronger it becomes. It, in fact, exits the vulnerable arena of american secular puritanism, a mental battlezone where your values and choices lay open to constant debate on whether they qualify as a “one right way”, amidst personal accusations of hypocrisy and so on.

As long as you engage in debate about the “personhood” of a tree, for example, you leave open the notion that a sane person could see the “itness” of a tree.

If you live a good life, people in search of a good life will flock to it. If you argue for a good life, people in search of an argument about what makes a good life will flock to it.

[I wrote this over at rewild.info, a forum I help moderate, that deals with rewilding.]

The more I learn about the successful “survivance” of tribal cultures, in the midst of civilization, the more I think that the basic human toolkit of confident disgust really works. In fact, I have a theory…

You have three kinds of people who need protection from the destructive influence of civilized culture.

1) Adults immersed in civilization.
2) Adults newly immersed in a culture dwelling beyond civilization.
3) Children

For #1, these people need explanations and articulations to reveal the dark side of civilization (at least, in so far as they ask for help and support to make sense of why this culture doesn’t satisfy their needs). They need it brought to light, so they can make a conscious choice about it.

For #2 and #3, articulating things makes acculturation more difficult. We just need to act in disgust and revulsion towards things that do not affirm life. Body language, and simple statements, lead the way.

As, in “yuck! gross! weird!”. With that Mr. Yuk face.

Nobody needs to explain to a child who sees Mr. Yuk what will happen if they taste the contents of a bottle with his face on it.

We all know, at this point, that civilization had to work overtime to fool anybody that it made even the least bit of sense. In fact, civilization created a “yuck!” response for abandonment.

Tribal cultures, the world over, have used gossip, and social pressure (otherwise known as “guilt” and “shaming”) to keep their cultures intact and humming along.

Guilt and Shame impact us rewilders so powerfully, that we have to tread incredibly lightly in rewilding these concepts. They have caused enormous amounts of pain in myself, and my friends, and even now haunt me a little. Such power they have! In using them, we can easily regress into civilized modes of virtue and purity, exactly what we want to escape.

But, as a community, I think we’ve reached a point where we can begin to talk about them, and begin to consider what it means to feel “shame” that one has made a life-denying choice.

At this point, civilization has done so much damage to human and other people, that the burden lies with it to explain itself. I reject it utterly in every aspect as a gruesome joke, an anti-life and anti-human endeavor. I need no more explanation, no more books like “Culture of Make Believe”. A cruel and laughable enterprise, Civilization makes a mockery of those who engage in it, and deserves no more substantive rebuttal than Mr. Yuk:

In balance to that, then you can celebrate the life-affirming side. Talking to plants and animals with your children, treasuring family connections and making them stronger, etc. etc.

I believe that we over-explain things to our children, and to each other. Children, and other adults, look to our faces, our body language, the tone of our voice, for direction on what affirms life, and what doesn’t. If we act from a strong center with disgust or joy, we embody the world we want.

I’ve spent some time lately burning through a book called “Gypsy Law“, edited by Walter Weyrauch. I’ve had revelation after revelation, and so many things have crystallized regarding my ongoing quest to “piece the invisible technologies back together”, without cultural appropriation, or the pick-and-choose consumerist paradigm.

Perhaps (concerning what I’ll write in a moment, here) I knew this already, but I didn’t KNOW it, if you get my drift. It sounds really simple, but I challenge you: do you really hear what it means, deeply? Apparently, I didn’t. To wit:

An intact rewilding culture, one based on the primacy of family and land relationships, maintains itself owing to a pool of constantly maturing adults who have the capacity to understand, make, and back up commitments to each other.

A maturing adult, according to this view, can make commitments not because they “just do it”, but because they understand their own surpluses and limitations. They do not agree to things that they cannot back up.

To understand one’s own ability to “back up” commitments, means exactly to understand the needs and feelings that drive human people, most of all, your own person.

This means that domesticated folks, beginning rewilding, will likely spend most of their time saying “No” to proposed commitments, as a default. They would do this, I suggest, because they do not understand what it means to honestly commit to something out of a natural capacity to back it up.

The status quo for modern domesticated folks has people saying “Yes, yes, yes” to requests, constantly breaking them and flaking out, blaming others for asking in the first place, overcommitting and out of balance. Or, worst of all, burning the candle at both ends in the “martyr syndrome”: never turning down or breaking a commitment, and slowly depleting one’s own health and vitality until…personal crisis or death.

* * *

Once a rewilding adult really understands this point of view, and puts it into action, I feel strongly that they make a quantum leap in trustworthiness and reliability. An intact rewilding culture means a group of people you can rely on, correct?

Current popular perceptions of rewilding may overly focus on the initial state of one-who-rewilds, that of reclaiming childhood passions, freedoms, and self-care, in order to come back into balance as a fully rewilding person. However, this initial state merely creates the foundation for one’s future reliability as a maturing adult, borne out of the self-knowledge that fruits from one’s reinvestment in self.

If I ask you to make a commitment to me, and you do any of the following things:

1) Say “yes”, even though you don’t want to, but you say it because of what you think I want to hear, meaning you eventually “flake out” on the commitment.

2) Say “yes”, because you want to make the commitment, but in honest reflection you know you don’t have the health and energy to back it up, and following through will further undermine your health reserves. You then eventually either “flake out” on the commitment to save yourself, or you follow through and have even less capacity to support your community.

If you respond these ways, how can I trust you? I need to know that you will only agree to things that affirm life, yours, mine, and everyone in our micro-culture.

This means that a maturing adult in a rewilding culture can not collaborate or rely on (though certainly they could support, befriend, play and eat together) any person who does not sufficiently understand their own needs and feelings.

No matter how much that other person wants to enter the world of “maturing adults”, no matter how much they will sacrifice to do it, an honest rewilding adult cannot support it, if they don’t share a common insight into the needs and feelings of human animals. As the saying goes, “we pave the road to hell with good intentions”. It refers exactly to this kind of situation, a lack of understanding of oneself and others.

Of course, you will see no clear line between someone who understands their needs, and someone who doesn’t - it runs in an unbroken continuum, from one end to the other. So all of this looks more like, “collaborating with those of a common level of understanding their needs and feelings”. Flock together with birds of a feather.

* * *

Now we get to the good part. Once you have a certain ability to make realistic commitments and back them up, and you associate with a group of adults with similar capacity, you have what the Mohawk call “Kashastensera”, translatable as both Power, and Unity.

You see, this points to one of those pieces of the Invisible Treasury that we lost. The ability to reach “one mind”, to act in accord with a group of rock-solid reliable adults, and change the world as a single organismal body when needed.

Once I understand myself, and don’t fear my needs or feelings, you can finally trust me. Once we trust each other in a real way, we can do anything together. One person, in accord with another person, have more than the power of the sum of two people. They have ten times the power. Ten people fully in accord with each other, have a thousand times the power of ten people not in accord.

Unity means we have the ability to conflict and disagree with each other, safely, because we no longer fear, or feel inconvenienced by, our needs and feelings, but rely on them to keep us true to course. This can look like arguments, mellow chatting, raucous laughter, whatever. It doesn’t mean we act like a bunch of monks at a buddhist monastery (or, our false image of even such a place).

It means we act like fully empowered adults. And we rock our world together.

Some folks know that eventually I plan to take my adventures and experiments with the place-based movement and martial-art that my friends and I call SHIFT, and take it as a jumping-off point for highly kinetic community theater intent on expressing the stories in the mythic cartography of one’s own Land. I didn’t invent this idea. In all honesty I doubt I’ve had one original idea in my life. Author Eva Wong inspired me to have this vision, by telling a story of her childhood…

From Eva Wong’s Tales of the Taoist Immortals

When I was a child, the stories of Taoist immortals were also dramatized in opera. Before Hong Kong became a bustling city crowded with skyscrapers and shopping centers, Chinese Opera troupes performed frequently in the streets. On the day before a performance, a street, usually one near a marketplace, would be closed. Workers would build the stage, set up rows of benches, and erect little tents where the performers could rest between acts. Large scaffolds decorated with flowers and banners would be placed around the stage and the seating area, and written on the banners were the names of the prinicipal singers. Whenever a troupe visited my neighborhood, our entire household–my parents, my grandmother, myself, and the servants–would go to the performances. I still have vivid memories of those shows; they were the only occasions when I was allowed to stay up late. The operas didn’t begin until dark, and, on a summer night in Hong Kong, that usually meant nine.

In Chinese opera, the performers were not only singers, but also acrobats and martial artists. The stories of the immortals–Chang Tao-ling’s battle with the lords of evil, Chu Yuan-chang’s (the founder of the Ming Dynasty) treacherous betrayal of his friends, Kiang Tzu-ya using his magic to defeat the evil emperor–came alive as the performers sang, whirled, sparred, and somersaulted around the stage.

Life-affirming interpersonal communcation can feel a lot easier than the world of self-help books and gurus make it seem.

In the way of Tracking, we have a wonderful metaphor for a relationship that we can use also with human people, not just the other-than-human ones.

In this episode I share my personal routine of reflection and communication that I use to improve relationships in my own life.

Jean Liedloff and the Continuum Concept: http://www.continuum-concept.org/

Marshall Rosenberg and Nonviolent Communication: http://www.cnvc.org/

Don Miguel Ruiz and the Four Agreements: http://www.miguelruiz.com/

 

 Clarity and Peacemaking: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

TAOIST-ANIMIST IMPROVISATIONAL TRAINING: “YES, AND…”

While boxing the other night, I felt a huge revelation wash over me. The tool I learned from Viola Spolin, via Lisa Wells, called “Yes, and…”, has so many intriguing and empowering applications. As soon as I began to, with my body, say “yes, and…” to every move of my partner/opponent, suddenly I acquired an overwhelming sensitivity, and stopped receiving hits. Not only that, but I landed a quite remarkable hit on a mentor of mine who said “he never even saw it coming”.

This didn’t occur because I had practiced harder, or sparred more, or psyched myself up. It happened because I applied what I knew from improvisational games to boxing, out of intense need to avoid getting clobbered. I didn’t acquire more skill, I just applied sensitivity from one area of life, to another.

This has made me realize that, in every day life, in every moment, I can either embrace by saying “yes, and…”, or I can resist with “yes, but…”, or “no, because…”, or just plain “no!”.

A TAXONOMY OF RESISTANCE

“Yes, but…” gives the impression that I’ve accepted the input of my partner (whether a boxing partner, traffic, weather, a creative project), but really it works to passive-aggressively counter it in the end. It doesn’t actually say, “Yes, and…”.

“No, because…” strives to show how reasonably I act with my resistance. Really, in all rational courtesy and right thinking, one must accept that my refusal of the world’s input makes a lot of sense! I will talk my way out of the reality of my resistance. Unfortunately, this means: in boxing I get hit, in traffic I start road raging, when writing I don’t finish projects, in relationships I build grudges., when swimming I drown, and so on. “No, because…” may fool other people, but it doesn’t fool the prevailing forces of the world. And it doesn’t make for a satisfying life.

“No!” actually comes the closest to an honest form of resistance. No apologies, or disclaimers, just outright tension and rejection. I have a lot of respect for “No!”. However, don’t confuse “No!”, with using “Yes, and…” to say the word ‘no!’ to something. For example, someone wants a schoolkid’s lunch money. To express “No!” basically means to curl up into a ball, to turn away, to shut one’s eyes. To say, “Yes, and…” by saying the word ‘no!’ means to stand up for yourself, to draw a line, to totally accept the conflict in which you stand.

CONFLICT GIVES LIFE

“Yes, and…” doesn’t mean capitulating, it means accepting both the energy of your partner, and the energy coming from within yourself. It doesn’t mean to pretend buddha-hood…quite the opposite. Remember, it comes from a methodology used to train actors! So you open up wide for the energy flowing through you. To say “Yes, and…” in the face of your fears, may mean to say “No effing way!”, may mean you laugh, may mean you cry, but whatever it looks like, it means wholly accepting the energies in the present moment.

It means you never ignore energy, you in fact underline it, point at it, jump up and down and get excited when you see it. No matter what. Fear, Joy, Anger, Sadness. They all move as energy, and to follow them means to Flow.

LIFE MEANS MORE THAN SURVIVING

Once I saw a hand-out, for a class on wilderness survival. At the top, I read an admonition to the effect of: when you find yourself in a surivival situation, DON’T PANIC. This struck me as funny because of the unintended reference to Douglas Adam’s ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, and also because of the poor understanding of psychology it reflected. As a poor choice, “don’t panic” ranks second only to panicking, in a survival situation. It doesn’t tell you what to do, it tells you what to reject.

In an amusing way, this also compares well to an object in Douglas Adam’s book, the “Joo Janta 200 Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses”, a pair of sunglasses whose tinting turned completely opaque and jet-black in the presence of danger. This would count as a “No!”, in terms of improvisational technique.

How might you play with this? The next time you find yourself in an unpleasant or uncomfortable situation, with your whole self say “Yes, and…!” to it. Then go into action. Notice what happens.

I wish I could make it more complicated than that. Sorry.

How does our language affect us? Do indigenous people’s languages reflect their fundamentally different relationship to the world, as contrasted with cultures of modern civilizations?

If we wanted to change the way we speak, in order to reflect a more satisfying relationship with the Land around us, where might we start?

E-Prime, English without the verb “to be”, offers an approach.

E-Primitive takes it even farther, adding verbiness and other factors that deepen the observation and process-oriented perspective of the world around us.

This podcast clocks in at about 26 minutes.

 

 E-Primitive and a Language of Place: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I admit, I don’t have personal experience with many of the ethnobotanical hallucinogens, often called “entheogens”. I’ve never taken mushrooms, or LSD, or such things. I can only tell my own story here, and I feel the need to.
When hearing non-indigenous people describe their plant-assisted ’shamanic’ journeys, I feel something missing. It reminds me of the great visionary stories, of Black Elk, and Buddha, and Jesus, and Stalking Wolf. And it all seems so intense, violent, and non-relational.

And I still don’t see why one needs a plant-intermediary to help establish a deep connection to land and spirit.

As in the title above, for me building relationships with friends and family, human and other-than, feels like an ongoing series of weddings. Courtships, and laughter, dancing, and feasts. Gifts, gifts, gifts, and receive thankfulness and community in return.

A wedding has so much going on. Just imagine then, if a crew of guys came in, and started up a fourth-of-july quality fireworks show, right there? Thunder and explosions, bursts of color and light, oohs and ahhhs.

But what about the wedding? It suddenly turned into spectacle.

I’ll admit, Christmas lights and fireworks don’t do anything for me, and maybe this explains the disconnect on my part.

It just feels so simple to me, though. My routine works this way: You want to befriend Cedar? Give Cedar gifts! Talk, and listen, to Cedar! Steward the Land around Cedar! Ask for blessings. Give blessings.

Can entheogens even find room to coexist in such a cozy, tight space, between courtier and beloved, between two best friends living in the bright, rainy world?

I don’t have any advice for those thinking about entheogen use, or who currently do. I tell my own story here, and wish you luck with your own.

You’ll notice in the sidebar I’ve begun a twitter stream of short questions, thoughts, and personal revelations. I often do several updates a day, and you can go to my twitter home page for the archive.

If you’ve never heard of “twitter”, essentially it allows for micro-blogging, putting a 140 character cap on any one post.

I hope, rather than the accumulated trivia of my day, you’ll find this another good resource for little thoughts on animism and updates on projects the College has going on.