We belong to a culture founded on enslavement, even into the present day, even into our own workplaces, neighborhoods, and living rooms.

I don’t refer to just the every-day third world enslavement of sweatshop workers and cash crop laborers of all kinds that make cheap goods and food possible; I also mean the modern first-world wage slavery that remains invisible to most people ensnared in it (though they most certainly feel it in their guts).

Marshall Rosenberg, developer of Compassionate (aka Nonviolent) Communication, mentioned once that he saw English itself as a language of Masters and Slaves, and built a whole methodology to explore sidestepping the impulses of such a language world. What do Masters and Slaves think about constantly?

“Is he Good? Am I Bad? Am I Right? Is he Wrong?”

Slaves think about whether or not they deserve a punishment; Masters think about whether or not the Slaves deserve more. These ideas of approval/disapproval interdepend on punishment to such an extent that you cannot separate them. Masters (or at least the meme of having a Master, if the subtlely matters to you) want to get inside your head, make you think that their thought belongs to you; that you in fact thought it yourself, when you didn’t. For the Slave, they always want to “get away” with things, and “work the system”. For the Master they always want to increase control, and work the Slaves harder. Keep in mind too, that no Master in our culture escapes enslavement to a Master greater than them. Anyone who plays the game of Masters and Slaves will play both roles in their lifetime, will play them both in many different places and at different times. A Father enslaves the child; the child Masters a younger sibling; the Foreman Masters the Father.

Does anybody still remain blissfully ignorant that the oppressed learn the tools of oppression most thoroughly of all, since they know more than anyone how the harsh command sounds, and the bite of the whip feels?

For many people in our culture, they carry a lingering guilt that they participate in a culture of  this same enslavement. But many of these people don’t realize that they have Masters too, and that the reason they can’t step outside of choices which enslave others, the reason why each decision they make to act ethically only leads to more hypocritical dead ends, the reason that drives this impossible chase through the labyrinth of the devouring Minotaur with sinews woven of our own culture’s dark side, this reason lays hidden behind our illusion of freedom and “first-world” status. Abandoning the labyrinth would in fact mean abandoning everything good, and right, and true. Get it? By doing Right, you’ve done Wrong, and you’ll have to get back in line.

How do you deal with such heartsickness, and the impossible tangled web of hypocrisy which you can’t escape? For me, you begin with burying the dead.

Once we admit that Right and Wrong have died to us, as useful companions, we can start burying their many masks. Owing to the ghost-stuff of which this culture made them, we can’t actually put them in the ground, but their Masks…! Ah, their Masks. We have lots of those. For some, old Report Cards mask these companions; for others, awards and certificates. For some their profession itself masks the attempt to stay one step ahead of the Minotaur of shame and guilt. For others, the watch on their wrist. For others, makeup, clothes, cars, gadgets. He who dies with the most toys wins, you know.

Whatever the Mask, you can hold a funeral for Right and Wrong, just as you would for anyone else with whom you’d had a bittersweet relationship. Certainly it felt so sweet to be Right. But of course, that meant too you had to often feel the harsh smallness of being Wrong. Right sounded like fanfare and felt like falling confetti; but Wrong felt quite different, like abandonment, loss, exclusion. Sometimes Right feels like justified Anger, wrathful and condemning. Sometimes Wrong felt like failure, self-hate, depression. Together these two took you on a wild bipolar ride of addiction. You can’t just throw dust on the place of Wrong; you have to also leave flowers on the Grave of Right. The same pale face lies behind all the masks - look now. The same face, both Wrong, and Right. The same person.

The exact same haunting ghost, now caught on the wind of your goodbye prayers, just as you begin to speak them…

Every year and every day, at this time, this ghost, this pale face both Right and Wrong will ask you about the new Spring. Will you shed hot tears, remember how good indeed Right felt, but decline the companionship, as you bury more Masks of this faithful, footstep-dogging companion?

Who in this culture escapes the trap of addiction? At the very base of it all, no one escapes the need to constantly rebury Right and Wrong. Certainly not me.

What does that leave us with? How do we then measure and adapt to the feedback of the world? We’ve only ever used Right and Wrong to measure these things.

Everytime I bury a Right or a Wrong, I reaffirm my commitment to a new measure: that which creates life, and liveliness.

I learn more and more what this means, all the time. The path to recovery can start with an edge of narcissism, but only because someone interrupted the years specially set aside for our narcissism (childhood) with harsh appraisals of Right and Wrong. Once we recalibrate, we learn how social and compassionate “life and liveliness” looks, no matter where we stand. But don’t overthink the trip; you’ll only learn by walking there.

[For those of you not in the know, a reference to Evan T. Pritchard’s book, and to the fact that no intact indigenous languages have a word that corresponds to the word ‘time’ in modern languages. Also check out my podcast EPISODE 20: The Ceaselessly Latering Day].

The mind, along with the body’s needs, chooses and directs attention. I think we can start there. Our culture, our idiom, our language, all direct our attention. Questions direct our attention.

How we move our attention, either supports or distracts us from our intentions. Our ability to talk about a task easily, makes it easier to finish it, and finish it in line with our intentions.

Every field of endeavor has its own jargon for this reason. Different fields of science may have their own grammar; some even involve entirely different languages than English (such as algebra). Think of David Bohm’s quest to create the English-based “rheomode” (verb-only English) so he could easily talk about quantum phenomena.

Building pyramids, as I’ve mentioned oft before, required the innovation of professional classes. Societies without strict roles simply don’t build pyramids. What do wandering free families need with a pyramid?

If you want to accomplish something in a sustainable fashion (i.e. with grace and ease), you need to learn its language. To hunt a deer, you must learn Deer language. To navigate the ocean in a kayak, you must learn Ocean language. To revivify traditions of Family, Village, and Land, you must learn the languages of these organisms. Speaking the language used for building pyramids,  in the context of building family, will make this work harder, sow confusion and distraction, and constantly drag against a task for which it has no functional language to talk about.

An example - if you descend from a long line of English speakers, does anyone in your family ever talk about “frith”? Frith comes from Old English, and indicates the deep peace and security that comes from healthy social and kin companionship.

Trick question, sorry. Frith died out in use as Middle English emerged. But let me reask that - do you even have a word for such a thing? Do any heavily acculturated modern peoples even think about such things? Perhaps the lucky ones. For most of us, we lost the word as we lost the value for this peace that we feel in the secure bonds of a joyful gathering of kin, blood or not.

What you have no words for, you will rarely think about; and when you do think about it, you will have long-winded attempts to encapsulate your meaning. I haven’t even really plumbed the depths of “frith” - I regard my above definition as a rather shallow and brief one. These long-winded attempts to talk about something mean that you can’t easily do anything about it.

Idiom can impact this too. You don’t always need words, sometimes you just need idiom to keep an idea alive. Our replacement idiom for frith, however, pales in comparision: “blood is thicker than water”. I don’t entirely know what that means, actually. However, think of the Gypsy Roma and their animate idiom towards killer cars, water, alcohol and electricity.

To reviviy traditions and technologies, we must create the language tools to speak of them: idioms, words, and grammar. We can start anywhere, though.

Sometimes it only takes a word - like “frith”.

Rewilding means different things to different people. To a scientist, it may mean the reintroduction of a wild species into its former habitat. To an anarchist, it may mean the political and personal freedom achieved by abandoning modern values and habits.

I, and others, have adopted the term to describe a large part of what we do, because we never before had a good word for what exactly we do.

And what do we do? We don’t practice primitive skills, because although we enjoy starting campfires with a wooden bow-drill, building wilderness shelters, tracking animals, we neither see these skills as  “primitive”, nor as the beginning and end of what we do.

We don’t practice Native American spirituality, because although we endeavor to grow roots in our  bioregion, and choose animist relationships with the world around us (and receive further mentoring from native Indian mentors on how to explore this choice), we don’t see root-growing and animist choices as exclusively Native American activities, nor do they simply fit under the label of “spirituality”.

We don’t practice permaculture, because although we do continue to learn from and implement how indigenous peoples cared for the land under our feet to maximize food production, we pursue a far deeper and more committed relationship to the Land than an agricultural one.

We don’t pursue green anarchism, because although we do see the unsustainable nature of civilization in all its historical forms, we see a need for more than just political and social change.

We don’t pursue end-times survivalism, because although we can see the ongoing collapse of modern civilization and all its many institutions, we don’t await its end with stockpiled food and exit strategies, but rather see it as the best excuse ever to choose a life worth living today.

So, we don’t do a lot of things, apparently. But still, what exactly do we do?

Rewilding, in the sense that mythic cartographers and animist folks of varying background use it, means a constant renaissance and return to values and technologies of Family, Village, and Land.

To me, this truly means living the Good Life. It means enjoying and prioritizing food, family, ethical work, partnerships with the wild. It means taking responsibility for our ancestry, it means taking time to grieve for what we’ve got, and praise for what we’ve lost. It means no more “move on, get over it”. It means walking away from the life we no longer want to live, and choosing now the life we want to live. It means following our hearts.

The Rewilding Renaissance describes the ever-growing commitment of so many people to recreating and reinventing lost traditions of Family, Village, and Land. We don’t see an end-point to this process; human beings have always had to renew their commitment to living in a beautiful way that works.

It only matters that we begin.