Nature Meditation and Creepy Crawlies

I just wrote an a quick n dirty guide about nature awareness on my dream studies blog. Really I should publish it here on my ecopsychology blog, but Blogger disallows pages outside the blog hierarchy. So it goes!

Spending time at my secret spot outside (a la Jon Young) is kicking my butt because the ticks are getting brutal. There's not a lot of lyme disease around these parts, luckily, but still I have to be vigilant about making sure none of the buggers are tapped in for longer than 24 hours.

It's all about: take a hike, sit for half an hour, hike back home, strip down, throw clothes in the hot wash immediately, body check, shower, body check, get dressed and then proceed to have the heebie jeebies (or more accurately the creepy crawlies) the rest of the night as imagined ticks swarm all over me.

And, inevitably, I find one the next morning, sunk in and kicking back.

Repelling mosquitoes is easier. I admittedly have gone the Deet route, but it creeps me out. Skin-so-Soft? Not-so-much: it doesn't works for long against the serious mosquito clouds I encounter in the North Florida forests. Recently I found this great advice about natural bug repellent on the Fabulous Forager. But I'm lazy, and haven't concocted my own homemade bug repellents yet.

However, something that does work is lighting a stick of incense or two around me. The incense smoke keeps the mosquitos away and also reinforces my own meditation practice. Purists may argue that this is making too much of a human footprint. My goal is not to be invisible in nature, but to be recognized by the non-human others and accepted. And, by way of verification, the squirrels haven't alarmed me in over a month.

Anyone got more advice? My skin will thank you.

The Integral Indigenous Movement

Native American leaders from more than 71 nations are meeting in Mexico to discuss what they can do to help with the ecological disaster that is the 21st century.

This is a historic event for many reasons, chiefly being the unsurpassed level of connectivity and cooperation amongst the original people of North America. Representatives range from the Maya to the Tlingit of Alaska, with a united voice that: "Our Mother Earth is being polluted at an alarming rate, and our elders say that she is dying."

Indigenous science is coming into focus for Westerners at a quickening rate. Note that the message hasn't changed in the last three hundred years; rather, it is our ability to hear the message that is changing.

This kind of connectivity really is one of the fruits of the modern age, in which the depth of Indigenous knowledge is complimented with the modern values of inter-culture communication and world-level sharing. This unique blend of paradigms is what Ken Wilber and Tim Black have discussed as an Integral Indigenous perspective. This is not idle theory; the culture is shifting.

With so much to be alarmed about in the world, I am relieved to see some fresh and creative solutions emerging with the complexity of our predicament.

Read the AP article here.

Wildcrafting with Feral Oranges

Feral Oranges: they're lumpy, covered with warts, and they taste bad. But that's no excuse to let them fall to the ground and rot.

Central and North Florida are full of feral orange trees. Some are remnants of old groves, others are volunteers of these domesticates, and still others are direct descendants of the original Spanish oranges favored by the Native Americans.

But to the typical neighborhood housing committee, these fruit trees are considered a nuisance. That's because they attract animals, and also because of the nasty stinking mess that rotten oranges make when they are not picked. To review: feral orange trees are a nuisance because animals try to harvest the fruit, and also because animals are incapable of harvesting all the fruit.

You can almost hear the hushed whisper during the neighborhood meetings: That's terrible, isn't it, all those disgusting animals creeping around in our neighborhood, tainting our perfect lawns?

So we harvested a bucket of these fangley fruit in a suburban neighborhood outside of Orlando. Over the last few weeks, we've been adding the taste of feral to our dishes, mostly in the curries and stews that call for lemon or vinegar.

But last night we hit our stride. I bring you: the Feral Lemondrop.


Recipe for Feral Lemondrops
1. Squeeze those warty and maligned juicy oranges.
2. Add sugar or honey to taste (just like lemonade).
3. Add your favorite inebriate - we went with a dry sake and triple sec.
4. Crust the glass rims with unrefined or raw sugar.
5. Enjoy the sweet tang of feral with some ginger cookies or shortbread.

Thanks to the "Feral Princess" for her participation.

Rewilding aka Feralization

Rewilding is how we learn to live in a sustainable way as individuals, families, and as a larger culture. My friends also call this process feralization. It's not about going back to the stone age, but forward into a new age - not "The" New Age, mind you. As my friend Bruce Lerro likes to say "This is not the New Age and we are definitely not all one."

But that's exactly where globalization is taking us, to a monoculture that is unsustainable and dangerous to everyone involved - why? because our infastructure is more interconnected than ever before. The stage is set for a collapse of the civilization process that began 6000 years ago - and this is no longer fringe science, ya'll. Whether its gonna be thirty years or 150, the global civilization lifestyle is on its way out via peak oil, climate change, population boom, and the meltdown of industrial agriculture.

If you're a typical suburban-raised American like me, then getting food is about to get very interesting. When the dust bowl last rolled through 70 years ago, most Americans still lived on farms, and had a basement full of canned goods, a pen full of chickens, and control over their own water. Last I checked, 80% of us live in cities or suburbs and buy our salads in a bag. And don't get me started on the scarcity of water. Meanwhile, the sea levels rise...

So why wait? Let's start living the good life now. Collapse may or may not go down as prophesied by the apocalytic neo-Quinnians, but we're shifting the culture anyway - away from a world of ever increasing work and debt, and towards a future of abundance. As such, feralization is not about giving up on modern life, but giving back to our communities, human and nonhuman.

Check out this short video of Urban Scout discussing the basics of rewilding at a recent event in Portland:

and if Urban Scout's prognosis about civilization collapsing in the next fifty years scares you into never leaving home again, follow up with this video by Feral Kevin about his edible apartment balcony:

Basically, it makes me feel better to be prepared. We all have our own ways of going feral; there is no one right way. In fact, mono-ideas are just as bad as monocropping and monocultures as far as I'm concerned. I'm a dreamer and a writer, so my work involves sharing ideas, building communities and helping folks reconnect to their native dreaming intelligences. We are the ones we have been waiting for.