Once again, co-sponsored by the College of Mythic Cartography:

March 9th, at 7pm — download flyer

Circle of Life, Medicine Wheel – A Balanced Way of Life

Charles Fast Horse is an Oglala Sioux Medicine Man and artist. Born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1941, Charles leads workshops on the Lakota way of life at conferences and colleges throughout North America and is an intercessor for many ceremonies. His grandfather, Tom Spotted Bear, was a direct descendant of Thick Bread, who fought in the Battle of Little Big Horn when he was only 18 years old.

Charles graduated from United Tribes Educational Center in Bismarck, North Dakota. He is past president of the nonprofit Lakota Lodge Training and Learning Center and has led workshops for the justice system as well as other governmental agencies. In 1997 he was invited to bless America’s holiday tree in Washington, DC.

Charles and his wife, Hazel, are both artists. They work together to produce museum quality beadwork. For them, art is a way of life. Their art is a testament to the Indian traditions, as each creation is part of a story expressing the beauty and history of Lakota life. Their work is on display at Prairie Edge gallery in South Dakota.

Check out a new resource that my friend Urban Scout has started: http://www.rewild.info

The web’s first open source field guide to rewilding and primitive/indigenous technology!

You’ll see me there a lot.

I’ve hoped to build the case, piece by piece, for reinvigorating and revitalizing the practice of folk wisdom, folk reasoning, and the need for village philosophers, and I plan to continue to do so by delving into their place of strength: Riddles.

In order to solve (or create) a good riddle, the riddler must have developed the capacity for associative reasoning, aka metaphor, aka “layers of meaning”, aka insight. In this case, riddles don’t differ from Zen koans, interpreting dreams, understanding myths, using the tarot, or any sort of divinatory/interpretive practice. All run on the faculty of associative reasoning. All demand that you get to a place that you cannot arrive at by traveling in a straight line.

I first learned of concrete methods to develop this ability at a class run by the well-known tracker, survivalist, and earth philosopher Tom Brown, Jr., and I sincerely thank him for perservering in his teaching. He remains my greatest influence. Tom Brown, who calls himself “a coyote teacher”, likes to let his students figure out the layers and hidden meanings in his teachings, and so rarely tells you anything straight. And even when he does, he didn’t. He describes the associative phenomena as “dreams, visions, signs, symbols, emotions/feelings”, and classes them all as messages of your “inner vision”. But how to decode the messages? How to solve the riddles?

In the intervening years I’ve worked at cracking the nut of what Tom Brown passed on to me, which has evolved into a Theory of Riddles, and a practice of Riddle-Mastery. Whatever errors of method in my evolving sense of riddling belong solely to me, and whatever excellences to my mentor, as it has taken some substantive experimentation and exploration to come up with a way to convert a linear/literal/literate mind gracefully into an associative/metaphorical/layering one. As one of the greatest offenders of linearity and literalness, I have found myself an excellent test subject.

As I’ve mentioned before, Tracking can itself push one towards a riddling mindset, if you approach it with an open and native mind. Meaning, one can squeeze the life out of a line of tracks as easily out of any natural phenomena, and people often do. To master Tracking, however, one must learn to let go of linearity, literalness, and true/false thinking.

Discernment, naming, and classifying remain an honored part of indigenous traditions. How do they manage to classify nature, without compartmentalizing her? How do they name without pigeonholing? How do they discern, without cutting into flesh? I submit they do so using what I’ve come to call the Wise Compass.

Check EVENT CALENDAR for SHIFT cancellation this Saturday.

“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in one’s subject, and how to avoid them.”

-Niels Bohr

Aikido, a martial-art based on shinto (japanese animism) principles of peace and nature-based harmony, has always inspired me. The founder has an amazing history rooted in mythic cartography.

One of his students, later a well-known adept of Aikido, tells a story about how the founder, O-Sensei, resolved a conflict over thievery in his dojo (martial-arts training hall).

O-Sensei had more than his fair share of animist Royal Blood.

Every Place a Riddle,
Every Riddle a Poem,
Every Poem a Spirit,
Every Spirit a Place,

When my friend Julie and I first conceived of the College of Mythic Cartography, it inspired me to write the above riddle. But who would see the riddle in it? Though for me it encapsulates an entire universe of experience, from the perspective of a mythic cartographer, to someone else it may just seem a pretty saying. Why write riddles, with no-one to see them?

It feels foolish, though Nature does it all the time.

Once my mom came back from a trip to England and told me a story about the origins of the word “college”. Colleges, she said, came from pubs. Traditionally, people had met in pubs to discuss subjects with folks of like (or satisfyingly different) minds. As time went on, they began to plan ahead, to set aside certain eveninings every week for certain subjects. Over time, as they organized themselves more and more, they lost all of their informal nature and made the leap to a whole different level of organization.

But in the beginning, they began as a group of villagers, a group of colleagues, sitting around a table. The original College.

I wanted to revisit this idea, that no outside authority exists for our own education, our own curiousity. That talking with our friends, family, and community about what we feel passionate about embodies vital and constructive action. Shouldn’t our curiosities nourish relationships with people that we wish to have in our lives? Why go to an institution in some distant land or city, to create temporary institutionalized intimacies while leaving old ones (family and friends) to wither? Can we not explore a full realm of life, and living, right here where we actually live? Doesn’t it seem foolish to think we couldn’t?

Certainly we need share information across distances, in order to accelerate and empower our ability to rewild ourselves (just as you and I do right at this moment), but won’t it only increase the power if we stay rooted in our place?

Back to the riddle at the top. Taking back our humanity from an inhuman culture involves a lot more than saying “no” to things. We have to start planting seeds that we used to plant, before cilvilization, and once they grow to fullness, we have to pick and eat the food hanging heavy from the greenery. We have to not just say “yes” to these old/new things, but actively pursue them, feed them, tend them.

Modern ecologists generally understand that nature doesn’t act like a hierarchy, she acts like a web. To say “top of the food chain” doesn’t make much sense, because everything finds itself eaten by something else eventually. The natural web can have no pinnacle, any more than a spider’s web. It can have a center. But then, we can make anything the center of any particular web. This illuminates one aspect of the infinite pieces in the animist’s puzzle game.

Humans have played this game since they became human, as trackers. We also call it the riddle game.

One could say that the world has built itself out of riddles. Riddles frustrate the linear mind, and annoy it, yet once one has heard or found the answer to a good riddle, it seems obvious. It doesn’t seem foolish, or impossible to have discovered it. In a good riddle, you smack your forehead and say “Damn! I should have thought of that.” A riddle shows you a fresh way to perceive a familiar object, they show you hidden relationships, unlooked for associations.

Riddles work on the basis of something that one could call “associative reasoning”. In the human brain, connections manifest naturally this way, firing randomly with searching fingers, like lightning bolts, to find and forge new connections between formerly unrelated areas. This kind of thinking, this kind of inquiry, works. It solves riddles. When a scientist creates a hypothesis (”Eureka!”), they create it in this way, without understanding what they do, or having trained the faculty to do it. For this reason, Einstein made his famous statement, that in science, he valued imagination more than knowledge.

This ability grounds the village philosopher in the world. This ability acts as their foundation. This ability fires the engine of our dreaming selves, our myths, our bodyminds. This ability we must endeavor to develop.

So, how to do it?

I asked myself again today…why call this series of essays “breaking the spell”? And what do you know, but I did indeed have answer, possibly more subtle than a reader might at first assume.

The first reason to call it “breaking the spell” more obviously comes from the need for us all to shake off the hypnosis perpetrated by our all-too-powerful culture, involving ideas of success, what we call meaningful, how we relate to each other, etc. Not that it differs from any other culture in its ability to hold its members under a memetic sway…only, this culture (seeing it broadly, as the world-devouring machine that spans the planet) gets credit as the first human culture against which the majority of its members needed to defend themselves to achieve any happiness or heart’s-ease. Imagine that.

The second reason comes from a possibly thornier issue, the problem of this culture’s conception of reason, common sense, logic, and symbolic thought.

In my past writings, I’ve tried to loosen its ownership of such things, enough to allow the possibility of not just what apologists and supporters of indigenous peoples call “other ways of knowing”, but of an entire other sphere and culture of inquiry. Not, “modern science plus intuition”, but instead a seamless whole, that I call Tracking, but one can also call “animist inquiry”.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this site talking also about animist language, the very semantics (”meaning”) and syntax (structure) of thought. In other words, how you speak controls how you think. If you use a language that differentiates between two objects, you will tend to see them as separate things. In Russian, “rukey” means hand. “Rukey” also means arm. In fact, it means hand-arm. The language deals with the foot/leg similarly. Fun fact: if you’ve read Tolkien’s book the Hobbit, you’ll know that Hobbits, a fictional race, have hairy feet. In russian translations of the hobbit, the (russian) illustrator drew hobbits as having hairy legs and feet. Not just feet. And not just one russian illustrator did this, but all the ones I’ve seen. Yet illustrators from other countries (and languages) consistently drew only hairy feet.

Does this mean Russians cannot discriminate between two parts of the human anatomy? Obviously not. It does mean that on some level, their language impedes their ability to discriminate in certain areas, as with all languages. Much like with English and its various controlling constructions (like the verb “to be”), we can talk around the handicaps of our language, and struggle (and succeed) to describe nondual phenomenon like quantum events, but in the end we still dwell in a language-world that pushes us towards dualism, that fundamentally biases us.

You can also imagine what Science then does to a human heart, a science that assumes a dead mechanical world, however coldly beautiful to the technician.

All this to say, “breaking the spell”, to me, addresses spell in its origins of “spelling”, having to do with the building blocks of language and symbolic thought. Literacy has acquired such a towering influence over us that many people think that “if someone wrote it, it must ‘be’ true”. Nothing could lie further from the truth…if someone wrote it, it doesn’t match reality, though it may have some use as a model of reality. But then, we’d have to go out and test it, to see.

Nothing spoken, written, or recorded in any fashion can do anything more than point to a line of inquiry, which we then have the choice whether to follow up on.

This culture keeps us occupied by supplying us with so many dead-end lines of inquiry, that many will never test anyway (but instead simply take on faith), that we hardly ever reach the opportunity to test something that actually works well. We spend most of our time mitigating the experiments and lines of inquiry that have wounded us (9 to 5 jobs, poorly matched or maintained relationshiops, unsatisfying models of success, the cult of authority/expertise/accreditation, etc.).

I read a book not too long ago called the Village Herbalist, which advocated the renewal of old traditions of herbalism, having an herbalist in each home who could deal with day-to-day needs, one in each village who could deal with the rarer and more acute medical needs, and one in each region who dealt with the most rare and most subtle of medical dilemmas. None of the different herbalists had more “expertise” than another, they in fact simply had different needs that they served.

I’d like to encourage the same with animist inquiry. We have to relearn how to think, relearn how to observe. We have to rewild our philosophies. We have to take back authority over our bodyminds away from our domineering culture, in order that we can build lives (and a new culture) that actually works well for us. A Village Philosopher could act as a cheerleader, an inspiration for such a difficult and (let’s face it) intimidating act. Sometimes people just need a role-model to accelerate positive change in their own lives.

In the next post, I’d like to talk about an underdeveloped skill, in modern days, that a village philosopher would need to revive.

Animism, because it seeks to relate and converse with the world, rather than to define and control it, always renews itself. It wakes up every morning fresh and alive, and every evening it tucks itself to bed to dream again for the very first time. Since animism involves a relationship with the world, a living being that exists in the now, the present moment, what more relevant perspective could you find?

You’ll see this the opposite of science, a culture which, in spite of its ideals, constantly tries to discover “the ways things really are”. Imagine the culture-wide relief if civilization finally finished placing the last piece of the finite puzzle that science perceives.

Of course, the animists, with their puzzle of infinite pieces, laugh at such notions. Of such things only the civilized dream.

But we also know animist cultures to have very strong, very stable, very conservative traditions, enough so that we often call these peoples “traditionalists” or “traditional cultures”. How odd…adaptable, relevant, fresh cultures…yet also highly conservative, claiming their traditions rooted in the dawn of creation, and indeed many having lived the same way for thousands of years.

How do we explain the apparent paradox?

Well, we can come at it from a couple directions. Though Jean Piaget claims that children come into the world with animist behavior, this may play down the extent and the depth of a true animist relationship, as seen by indigenous peoples.

One hint of this came from reading this passage from Graham Harvey’s book, Animism:

This chapter is interested in the language, thoughts, and actions of people who are, to one degree or another, ‘traditional’…the possibility of ‘becoming traditional’ may seem contradictory, but even prior to contact with Europeans…tradition was always something aimed for and lived towards rather than simply inherited…

This matched perfectly with my past experiences. I’d long noticed that though our culture stereotypes native peoples (past and present) as “more spiritual”, this doesn’t hold at all. Just like with all individuals from all cultures, native persons choose the lives they want. Within native communities in the USA, you can find plenty of dissension over spiritual practices. Many modern native people, often under intense pressure from our culture, have abandoned their old traditions and models for success for american ones.

I do consider native cultures as the most supportive environments for anyone wanting a deep, vibrant relationship with the world. Much like science, whether or not any individual scienctist stays true to the ideals of the practice, the culture itself keeps the members on the right track. And you will find some individual scientists committed to the ideals of “reality therapy” and honest observation (again, within a rather rigid civilized wordview).

This holds doubly true for animist culture…not every member pursues the implications of an “all my relations” worldview as far as they could, but enough do so to impact the family and community (at least, where civilization has not crushed them out yet).

I’ve found you can identify someone’s culture by the stories they repeat. If you ever hear someone say, “My Grandmother tells a story…”, or “My elders like to tell this story in times like this…”, you’ve found the major way an animist can explore their traditions. They don’t necessarily say, “I believe this happened”, they usually say, “I have heard this tale”, implying that they still seek to understand it. You probably can immediately discern the difference between this attitude, and that of an adherent to a modern religion, such as Christianity. The bible “is” the word of God. End of story.

An apprentice to animism doesn’t have it all, from the first moment. They don’t understand even a tiny fraction of the wild nonliterate library of wisdom that awaits. But they’ve started the process. They have starting “becoming traditional”.

So in a sense, those of us born into the mainstream civilized culture, have a similar challenge to those with the good fortune to live their entire lives surrounded by indigenous wisdom. And it never ends…ask a native elder if they’ve finally “mastered tradition”, if they’ve stopped learning animism. You can guess how they’ll respond.

Don’t make yourself a stranger to a deeply familiar and familial relationship to the world. Don’t consider yourself a guest. Sure, you may have just begun, but so has the world.

Which means you have a lot of company today.

Rereading an interview with an old mentor of mine, Jon Young, I had to laugh…I’ve really started to sound like him, though I thought I arrived the current point in my development in the absence of his influence. Which makes it all more amusing, as you shall see if you read the last bit of the interview.

In any case, I encourage you to read the interview to get a sense for what I mean when I say “tracking”…it may surprise you that following footprints comes as one of the last things I think about when I refer to “Tracking”.

Author Henry Bauer makes a couple points more that I’d like to touch on…with all this “irreducible uncertainty in science”, “science signifies nothing more than a social process, not an intellectual one”, and “science has no authority”, one might think that science doesn’t amount to much worthwhile. Well, though we’ve mythologized the “scientific method”, it still exists as an ideal, and a relationship to nature, a relationship Bauer terms “reality therapy”. Though we cannot say that science embodies truths or guarantees about reality, we can say that it always seeks to reflect reality (however imperfectly, impeded within the constraints of a dead-world paradigm). When science begins to look for what it wants to see, reality eventually readjusts its perspective. Thus, “reality therapy”.

And this has made all the difference in the world, within the confines of civilization. The ideology of science puts the word of nature, that which we observe, above what we think we should observe. Obviously to make the civilized world work the bulk of modern humans cannot possibly use this notion in their day-to-day lives. Hence most people transforming science into just the latest and ever-more-perfect authority, a far more palatable notion than its true face, a social process of neverending and ongoing questioning, oriented towards reflecting and understanding what actually exists. Even Bauer, in his book, posits that the model of “the puzzle and filter” means that one day we can fit the last piece into place, that the puzzle has finite pieces. I believe this drags the specter of authoritative science back into the picture, something that he claims to not want. I believe the puzzle has an infinite number of pieces, thus destroying any possibility of finishing it, but in my mind, unfathomably enriching the actual process. What use do we have for goals, except to immerse us in the journey?

“Reality Therapy”: whether or not (and to what extent) individual scientists enact this ideology, the culture of science itself tends to filter out that which does not seem to reflect reality, a remarkable refining process.

Imagine if you did this in your own life? Or for those of you that do, notice again the enormous positive transformation it created. Gracefully adapting to what the world tells you, to what it insists upon, even when it changes its mind (or appears to), amounts to no less than a revolution of philosophy. Imagine every thing that you consider about yourself, about models and systems of reality that you rely on in your daily life, imagine them flowing and shifting with the flux of the feedback of the world.

Our enslavement and domestication depends on our refusal to see the world as it truly presents itself to us.

Science owes it success not just to its social nature, but also to its reality-based ideal. Perhaps given enough time, “science” would have naturally and inevitably transformed into what I term “animist inquiry”. Sadly, the world does not have the time to wait for science, or the domineering culture it serves. We have to live in a new way now, which requires a quantum leap in our personal and communal philosophies…we need to rewild the bodymind for us, for our families, for our village, for our mothering land.

Come join us for SHIFT at Whitaker Ponds:

http://www.portlandonline.com/parks/finder/index.cfm?ShowResults=yes&SearchText=whitaker+ponds

Saturdays at 12 noon, next to the north baseball field.

Dress for cold, wet, and muddy! Woo hoo!

I almost titled this “rewilding your mind”, but that implies a split between one’s mind and body, a pernicious myth, which as far as concerns me creates a kind of schizophrenia, even when used innocently for convenience. The human bodymind, not an abstracted mind-brain, reasons, discerns, and recognizes patterns. Perhaps that needs another blog to fully address…in any case, how do we rewild this faculty of reason?

The first step requires us to see the cult of science clearly…in Henry H. Bauer’s Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method the author states the case very clearly.

In his book he refers to the model of the success of science not having to do with a mythical scientific method (known as the “hypothetico-deductive method”, a hundred-odd year old creation of science philosphers trying to explain the success of the creature known as “science”), but rather with the revolution in communication…the ability of investigators to communicate experiment and speculation more easily and quickly than ever before in civilization.

“Historians are agreed that modern science has its roots in the seventeenth century…continuity becomes much harder to discern as one goes back farther than that. One knows of bits of science in particular places at some times—in ancient China, and ancient Mesopotamia, in classical Greece, in early Islam—but there is not much coherent progression towards modern science to be discerned in them. If modern science owes its success to application of the scientific method, then one has to regard the seventeenth century as a time when people, specifically in western Europe, first become really adept at drawing conclusions from observations, at testing hypotheses, at learning about the world from actual experience. Such an explanation is simply not tenable. From at least two or three millennia before that we have records of insightful discussion of empricism and logic…Human beings knew about empiricism and skepticism and were capable of logic long before the seventeenth century, and not only in western Europe…”

Please note that the author doesn’t claim a lack of useful knowledge or discoveries in ancient civilization…he just wants to explore why modern science has the accelerated pace and particular qualities that it possesses today. Also, as a reader of this blog you’ll know that, as a student of tracking, I consider humans innate, age-old users of empiricism, skepticism, and logic, knowing that we became humans by becoming trackers. For more on this see Louis Liebenberg’s the Art of Tracking: the Origin of Science. So humans have practiced empiricism, skepticism, and logic for countless millenia — since they began tracking.

“…If modern science is recognized to be an inescapably cooperative, social activity, it becomes plain enough what was crucial in seventeenth-century western Europe: viable scientific societies were formed and scientific journals were established. Indeed, it is remarkable how well the measurable growth of those indicators of scientific activity over the last three centuries extrapolates back to a beginning in the seventeenth century (fig 7)…”

Figure 7 (enjoy the tiltedness):

Remember again, we trace the roots of (modern) science to the seventeenth century. This should serve as a wake-up call to the true believers in the church of science — science owes its success to wide communication and fellowship; it does not constitute a better form of knowledge, but results from the dividends of sharing knowledge. Science describes a social phenomenon, not an intellectual one. Bauer cites a wonderful model for this behavior, the “puzzle and filter”.

“Even though science is done very differently in the various specialties, and the consensus over how things ought to be done embodies significantly different emphases in the various fields, the different sciences nevertheless can be seen to have somehting in common if one focuses on the social activiites that make up the enterprise of science…

…As Michael Polanyi has suggested, doing science is rather like putting together a jigsaw puzzle:

Suppose we share out the pieces of the jig-saw puzzle equally among the helpers and let each of them work on his lot separately. It is easy to see that this method, which would be quite approprate to a number of women shelling peas, would be totally ineffectual in this case, since few of the pieces allocated to one particular assistant would be found to fit together…The only way the assistants can effectively cooperate and surpass by far what any single one of them could do, is to let them work on putting the puzzle together in sight of the others, so that every time a piece of it is fitted in by one helper, all the others will immediately watch out for the next step that becomes possible in consequence. Under this system, each helper will act on his own initiative, by responding to the latest achievements of the others, and the completion of their join task will be greatly accelerated. We have here in a nutshell the way in which a series of independent initiatives are organized to a joint achievement by mutually adjusting themselves at every successive stage to the situation created by all the others who are acting likewise

Polyani’s metaphor, straightforward as it may seem, is capable without further ado of illuminating salient features of science: that modern science began when cooperation among scientists became widespread and systematic; that modern science is a quite particular sort of cooperative venture, working most successfully when autonomous; that what really constitutes pseudoscience is isolation from the scientific community; why science cannot be successful and also produce what ideologues want…”

Notice that second-to-last point: psuedoscience means isolation from the scientific community. I see a connection between that and our anti-social “rewilder”, aka “the mountain man”. You cannot perform an essentially social and cooperative activity in isolation. Though the hermit plays a role in human culture, they play a very particular role, and need to find a place amongst a diversity of human co-action. The community itself can consist of any group (scientific or otherwise), but inquiry outside of the community, in isolation from it (or simply belonging to a different group), identifies a fundamentally different activity, a different “science”, a different sphere of exploration. Pseudoscience simply means the fields which scientists don’t cooperate on. Which sheds some interesting light on the idea of pseudoscience…can we call any sincere inquiry a pseudoscience? Perhaps pseudoscience most usefully describes the act of insincere inquiry.

Through an inherently conservative human process, the puzzlers’ game puts ideas through a filter, with the fit of puzzle pieces reaching broader and broader consensus (as disagreements over certain arrangements filter many out). In the same vein, however broad the consensus, a new revolutionary piece, that fits in an unexpected way, will force the abandonment of an entire section of the puzzle, since the players had based it on the fit of fundamental pieces that now they see work less well than the new piece. Players can expect substantial resistance if they think they will easily convince other players to accept a revolutionary new piece that requires the complete reworking of substantial sections. No one likes to feel like they’ve “wasted” their time, and yet one cannot actually waste time in this fashion…the perception of having to “do it all over again” still persists, thus the well-known resistance to new scientific paradigms.

Alright. Next step: the inherent uncertainty of knowledge (inclusive of the “scientific” kind). Bauer, in the section titled “Discarding the Myth of the Scientific Method”, continues on:

“…Under [the filtering process discussed], scientific knowledge becomes…more firmly accepted as time goes by–those parts of it that are not jettisoned along the way…At no stage, however, is guaranteed certainty reached; at no stage is it definitively proven that scientific knowledge is truly in accord with nature. Science is seen not to be dealing in permanent or absolute truth, as it was or could be seen if the scientific method could crucially test hypotheses against reality.

The myth of the method is not easily discarded, for one thing, because humankind is reluctant to accept that all knowledge contains an irreducible, inherent element of uncertainty. Over the last few centuries, the authority of science came to supersede that of religion precisely because science seemed to offer more certain knowledge, at least about the tangible world. If scientific knowledge now turns out to harbor ineradicable uncertainties, then science is in essence a false god, and moreover, is inferior to the God on whom science turned its back. So there is a reluctance to accept that the method is a myth, reluctance especially on the part of atheists, secular humanists, Marxists, and other such ideologues—perhaps the more so because fundamentalists and New Age obscurantists have also been so eager to topple science from its pedestal of authoritative uncertainty.”

So, we’ve reached a good stopping point. The vital importance of all this talk about science comes down to the need to understand what makes the engine of scientific activity, a social phenomenon that accelerates the pace of investigative/intellectual activity, so successful.

So now we can understand that if we want to accelerate our own explorations, we need only copy what the scientific and industrial revolutions have accomplished, an idea already suggested by Daniel Quinn in his book Beyond Civilization. We don’t need keener intellects, bigger vocabularies, or more extensive education and scholarly degrees. We can perform rewilded inquiry, animist inquiry, every bit as successful as science, simply by emulating the social revolutions of recent history, which amounted to a revolution of communication.

Did I just say the internet will save us? Well. Whatever the medium, whether digital or face-to-face, or in paper periodicals, the sharing of information of how to live in a new way will accelerate the pace of rewilding itself.

Also, we now know that scientific knowledge does not consist of a “better”, “higher”, “more objective”, “more accurate” kind of knowledge. At any time, new data and models can topple the most well-founded of scientific thought. Scientific activity does produce a highly filtered, highly cooperative, highly reviewed amount of information and understandings, to its credit. We could ask no more of such a pursuit…but we shouldn’t hesitate for a moment to think that we too have the skills and abilities to perform important and useful inquiry, inquiry that we find satisfying, based on sustainable and inspiring paradigms: a living world woven out of our relatives, our bodies, our sensations.

Succintly: set free your ability to reason. Rewild your bodymind. Know that science has no authority. Emulate the social revolution that it embodies, using new/ancient nourishing paradigms, such as animism.

Really, if I had you here next to me, I’d just teach you tracking, and I wouldn’t have had to write any of this…

What does “wild” mean? What does it mean to “rewild”?

What does it mean to “tame” or “domesticate”?

Looking at domesticated animals (including humans), I see a relationship built on dependence. This dependence atrophies natural faculties, natural gifts. Look at domestic dogs…we’ve bred certain traits into them, at the cost of their operational intelligence. Search the internet for stories about captive or wild wolves and you’ll see the vast gulf between a wild and a domesticated mind.

So, for me I can proceed from there to look at the domesticated human, versus the wild one. Certainly tribal peoples depended on each other, but I’d say we’d call the relationship more accurately interdependence. A peer relationship, in a sense. Conversely, dependence implies a one-way hierarchy.

More than anything, to me, wild means free.

Why do all our cultural connotations of the word “wild” connect to crazyness, erraticness, unpredictability, aggressiveness?

How can we say “wild and free” in one breath (a common cliche), and “wild and crazy” in the next (another common cliche).

Does wild mean crazy, or does it mean free? Perhaps we connect those ideas because our culture fears what it cannot control, what it cannot domesticate, what it cannot render dependent.

The more I talk about this, the more I again see the prison walls and cells of our culture, the too-real metaphor offered by Daniel Quinn, in his book Ishmael.

So then, to rewild means to set free.

To set free, means to escape dependence.

To escape dependence, means to reclaim one’s natural gifts.

To to reclaim one’s natural gifts means to become interdependent.

My friend Rod McAfee, a Akimel O’odham native from Arizona, calls this process, “the Natural Way”.

Our culture has a long tradition of the archetypal and anti-social “mountain man”, who has run away to the wilderness to escape contact with other human beings. How does this person differ from any other kind of recluse? They have little in common with tribal peoples, except in how they feed and shelter themselves.
Rewilding doesn’t mean running away from people. It means finally running back to people.

Running back into the arms of family, of friends, of interdependence.

And always, family includes more than just humans, but the entire landbase, the living place of interacting relations where we live.

Someday I won’t have to even say that last part.

They hang the man, and flog the woman,

That steals the goose from off the common;

But let the greater villain loose,

That steals the common from the goose.

-Oliver Goldsmith