After Almost Three Months of Rewilding

June 4th has come upon me as the time I make my way back to the big city of She's Addled. I have been part of a process of rewilding that has been increadible in so many ways. I began with the conviction that I owed these people; the Shoshone, Paiute, Wasco, Apache, Ute and others I do not know the names of. Their lack of presence in our present day life is a testiment to our failed ability to listen to what is alive. Life means water for one thing, and for us humans, fire for another and the main thing: food. How this process worked for me, I will try to explain my steps so maybe one could follow some of the ideas, and test it out themselves.

We live in a time of food anxieties of all kinds; this disease, that disease, from what we are eating, what we won't eat, as well as confusion to what we are hungry for. I know now where to find food, and water. I see the way water flows, wind flows, and sun flows, and how that interrelates to where the plants grow, where there might be a spring, where to face my tent, all these things have added to my comfort as well as my increased awareness of what each plant I have interacted with basically needs to prosper. When these plants prosper, so do the local animals;antelope, mountain goat, jackrabbit, ant colonies, butterflies, horny toad as well as the human being who as planted back many plants and know where they are. I have learned all these things because of the Wasco Tribe sharing these things with a stick indian. This is someone who walks the "Hoop" while the Native American appears to 'asimilate'. These ways of walking on Mother Earth if Native people shared it with others of the last generation, they would have been dangerously threatened by the Americans of that time. What we are doing with pulling for wildflowers right now, planting back and reseeding as well as gathering the roots, used to be illegal. So, a lot of this knowledge has been kept secret for a long time.

Anyway, it is still dangerous to be of this caliber of courage, to walk this walk in the wilderness and let the city blocks of all kinds start to fade in importance, all the rules, that don't really make sense, but add so much fear and anxiety to life. Like that whole racist, classist, gender oppressive system that underlies so much in a people' only space, these blocks start to fade as another perspective takes hold. The perspective of one who is absolutely dependent on the Earth in a daily kind of way, and is not at a distance from what is actually supporting all life and spirit here, the natural spontaneous condition of wilderness. Everything we do as 'people' is entirely too much work, really!! Why do we want to haul so much water? Why not plant food and wonderful things like fruit trees where the water naturally holds the right conditions for them, like along Creek banks. Does the distance make us more superior? Is it the slave/master struggle we live in where we don't want to lift too much of a finger, and we can get a machine to do it? I don't think