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I keep thinking about how completely disoriented we are from the world, from time and space and food and the elements and the seasons.
About how new (and novel) this kind of disorientation is - and how deeply impoverishing it is to each one of us.
-a thread-
About how new (and novel) this kind of disorientation is - and how deeply impoverishing it is to each one of us.
-a thread-
I read this book about siting for a traditional house (in the vein of @wrathofgnon) and the first half was helping you orient yourself, spatially, on the earth. Which direction is the planet rotating? Which was is it tipped? Where will the sun rise tomorrow? 6 months from now?
When the sun and stars were all we had, the rhythms of the earth were both obvious and integral in our daily lives. Most people sitting at their desks would have to jump through mental hoops to even tell you which way south is.
We don't know where we are on the earth. We don't know where we're going or where we've been. Most of us are unrooted, so we just float in the tepid sludge of a culture driven by industrial marketing and the worship of money.
We're so incredibly disoriented that we often don't recognize there's a problem with our lives. Like, we were born dizzy into a dizzy culture intent on spinning us around faster and faster so the GDP goes brrr.
And we have no idea that there's a way of being that is NOT dizzy. We simply don't have the frame of reference anymore. Nothing is fixed.
We know something's "off" but not what it is. So marketing sells us "solutions" that never fill the void: "THIS will solve everything!" - not knowing that chasing these solutions keeps us locked in a kind of world where we'll never find what we need. https://twitter.com/aspiringpeasant/status/1391564237995089923?s=20
I can feel uncommon depth in some people who have found their bearings. People who move at a different pace than the prevailing culture, like Wendell Berry thoughtfully curating what he lets into his life. Like @homemadeguitars and his donkeys.
There's a clarity there, like they're not as dizzy as the rest of us and can see things so clearly that we're just starting to make out. I call that wisdom.
The scary thing about it is that, in order to find that perspective for ourselves, we have to reject so much of the prevailing culture it feels like we'd be alone in the wilderness.
Are we hypocrites tp throw away what we HAVE inherited the same way our parents (and theirs) threw away the traditions we now wish we still had?
It helps me to think about JUST how new strip malls and luxury SUVs and industrial agriculture are. And how much damage they've done to the quality of our lives so quickly.
These new cultural traditions are a suicide pact. Sometimes falling feels like flying ("colonize Mars" anyone?), but when you look for the source of "lift" you realize there is nothing but hopeful fantasy.
The best we can hope for is a parachute that slows our fall enough to ONLY break our legs and not kill us. A softER landing.
This disorientation and resultant fear are why we're so mean to each other sometimes. The culture around us is swirling so fast we have no bearings - we've alienated ourselves from the things that held the ground still under our feet: https://twitter.com/via_benjamin/status/1390288043697901569?s=20
That's not to say every tradition is good or valuable, but in the blink of a generation we torched [[Chesterton's Fence]] and now we're fumbling around, largely alone, trying to put it back together. And none of us has it figured out. https://twitter.com/RizomaSchool/status/1391841521016659971?s=20
The thing is that we can't put it back together. We burned it to the ground and put up a parking lot. The scale of this tragedy that will only ever be captured and understood and mourned piecemeal.
But that doesn't mean we just give up.
Cowards give up and shut down.
If you've been brave enough to find yourself staring into the abyss with me, you're braver than anyone I meet/see on a daily basis.
And you're not alone.
Cowards give up and shut down.
If you've been brave enough to find yourself staring into the abyss with me, you're braver than anyone I meet/see on a daily basis.
And you're not alone.
So we can't go back.
And what we're doing now is destined to fireball
So we have no choice but to move forward.
Which way, then?
What life will you make in the wreckage?
And what we're doing now is destined to fireball
So we have no choice but to move forward.
Which way, then?
What life will you make in the wreckage?
I like to think of myself as a composter, feeding off the waste streams of a dying civilization and use it to build the richest, most life-giving soil possible for my children and grandchildren (and theirs and theirs) to grow in.
I like to think that the world that comes next HAS to be better than suburban sprawl and the cult of busy and a shitty job to pay for a shitty car and a shitty house to play videogames and watch Netflix and scroll Facebook in.
I like to think that the world that comes next doesn't involve paying someone else to raise your kids or (barely) paying other people to spray poison on your "food."
I like to think that what comes next will be a return to living human lives at human scale at a human pace. https://twitter.com/aspiringpeasant/status/1390091960149430274?s=20
I like to think that we'll find the time and space to reabsorb the lessons we threw away when we eliminated the indigenous cultures that lived in this place, and lived well, for thousands of years before we chopped it up and paved it over and erased them.
(side note: it's not inherently "woke" to acknowledge this - Wendell Berry's excellent "A Native Hill" is a wonderful example of how one can think about inheriting land taken through genocide without falling into narcissistic self-flagellation)
We won't BE them and we can't make up for what was done to them, but we can honor their wisdom by becoming more like them in the ways that matter most: respect for life and place in a way that always considers the seventh generation to come.
I don't say this as some self-referential performative paean, but because that wisdom holds profound clues about how people once lived well here, for generations, without destroying everything.
One can acknowledge this without thinking Native Americans were perfect.
One can acknowledge this without thinking Native Americans were perfect.
We have an enormous task ahead of us and, when we look to the horizon, things look bleak.
But when we look at the soil beneath our feet, we see something we can work with - and that's a start.
But when we look at the soil beneath our feet, we see something we can work with - and that's a start.
