REWILDinfo: study, teach and converse. This brand new site has two parts, the first part contains a forum for rewilders to talk about rewilding, the second part contains a wiki serving as a free online field guide to rewilding. Come start a conversation at the forum and add your knowledge to the field guide today! Please tell all your friends to check it out too.
—
Show your support and appreciation for Urban Scout
Two years ago I moved to LA to work in the film industry. As you can see, it didn’t work out. LA chewed me up and spat me out… or Portland just couldn’t live without me. Either way, it was 3 months of hell. Here is a snippet of something I wrote back then…
The other day Willem and I began to clear out two very large entertainment centers that fill most of his room (don’t ask). We will plan to use the space as a library/study/internet station as we learn more about how to hunt and gather and for posting blogs. While cleaning it out Willem found an old USB universal game controller. Basically, it looks and works like a Playstation controller, but plugs into your computer. He said it used to belong to his brothers and asked if I wanted it… God help me I said, “Yes.â€
Well the first time I posted this over at naturetalk.net it dissappeared or was deleted. I have reposted it again, but in case for some reason it happens again, here it is…
Quick disclaimer for those who don’t know:
Kamana is an independent study naturalist training program created by Jon Young. Of all the schools I have been to, of all the classes I have taken, Kamana is the only one that I feel really set me up for success. It’s sounds funny to write that, seeing as how halfway through the program I destroyed all of the work I had done, trashed the workbooks, and sold my supplemental field guide library (that I spent over a thousand dollars acquiring) for mere pennies. Sounds dramatic and it was. At the time it felt like taking a huge shit after being constipated for years. I’m in a different place now and am seeking to rekindle that structure in a new/old way. This week I will begin to redo what I ritualistically burned so many years ago, having spent the last few year learning to get over or side step the hurdles of conformity.
My goal in life is to walk away from Civilization and become a full-time hunter-gatherer-horticulturalist. To walk away from civilization means a lot of things to a lot of people. To me, dropping out of high school was one step towards dropping out of civilization. Refusing to go to college was another. Refusing to work for someone else for a living is another. Yet, for every step I take I feel as though there is something else that gets in my way, another pair of chains I must figure out how to get out of. This week it is two pair; desire for celebrity and running wilderness schools.
I can personally remember feeling ill at the thought of libraries, full of books containing knowledge gained through science, burning down during the collapse of civilization. All that knowledge… lost forever… I used to believe that despite all the terrible things civilization has created, science still felt worth saving. For some reason I saw science as “pure,” something even civilizations mythology could not ruin. I don’t feel that way anymore. In fact, these days a wry smile forms on my face and my eyes begin to sparkle when I envision of a world without science.
Rarely do I think about money, let alone write about it. Money seems like one of the most trite subjects anyone could write about. Never the less, what began as a lament about money turned into a rant, which then turned into my first (and hopefully last) philosophical examination of my feelings about money, which bared some uneaten fruit… at least by me.
From October until April the Northwest is a cold wet place. I’ve always felt January and February mark the coldest, wettest months. During these months I have to fight this strange sensation that I am “not being productive.” Rather, I’m inside staying warm and dry and simply doing… not much. This has always made me feel guilty.
When I first read the book Ishmael (almost 9 years now!) I realized that Civilization was going to collapse in my lifetime. My initial response was, “I must learn to live like a hunter-gatherer!” I saved up a lot of money and went to a weeklong class at one of the nations most notorious schools for wilderness survival. During this class our instructors told us that by the end of the week we would be able to walk out into the woods with only a knife… and survive. That was very exciting. I could regain 10,000 years of ancestral forgetting in 7 days! Can you even put a price on that? The money was worth it. Of course this was a lie. The purpose of this I guess was to either get you inspired enough to actually try it when you got home, or fill the class with students. Well I was inspired, so I did it. The experience lasted 2 days. It made me so uncomfortable and ill that I to this day, six years later have never tried it again.
