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.

The landscape dreaming

Faithful readers,

it's time for a quick update on my adjustment to life in the southern hinterlands. North Central Florida is a place of delicate beauty, most of which has gone unnoticed by me as I tend to focus on picking the sand spurs out of my feet and the ticks out of my various nooks and crannies.

But check out this sleepy eyed view of a local cementary, complete with banana spider:

and just so there's no question as to the mythological framework of this place, ie the dreaming of land:

This is a place of fragrant breezes, big skies, and quiet mornings. It's also a place of stories, deep roots, and long memories. My friend Raven lent me the book Cross Creek just before I left California, and this book has turned out to be a spiritual guide to this area.

Here is what Marjorie Rawlings sez about entering a grove - she's talking about orange groves but I feel it with the live oak savannahs too:

"Any grove or any wood is a fine thing to see. But the magic here, strangely, is not apparent from the road. It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. By this, an act of faith is committed, through which one accepts blindly the communion cup of beauty. One is now inside the grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another." (p15)

A big theme for us has been walking down the trail and running straight into spider webs. The spider webs on the trail are thresholds like Rawling's rusty gate, and they are showing up in dreams too as signals to pay attention. As it turns out I'm not the only blogger paying attention to spider webs and dreams either. They're more than a call to alertness, but also a reminder of interconnection.

Another video from the future

Sorry that I keep straying into politics. Fudge. I promised myself long ago that Dreamcrisp is not a political blog. Hopefully posting this video will destroy any little bit of political integrity I have left so I can focus again on what really matters: Finding the time bag.

Compliments Eugene Mirman