Basically, the reason I’m focusing so much on mythology and philosophy and the spiritual dynamics of living in our dying civilization right now is that I really have an aversion to living outdoors, being close to nature, gardening, tracking, awareness, etc. It’s a hard confession to make, but it’s the truth. Perhaps this won’t come as a revelation if you’ve read my blog closely enough.

Yet, what I want and dream of is to be at home in the middle of nature. I know theoretically that that would be the most in balance, it would bring me the most fulfillment, and also, if I were able to live in harmony with nature I would have the best chance of surviving the coming difficulties.

So how do I get from point A to point B? How do I get myself to move in a direction that will ultimately be good for me, without doing violence to myself? Answer: Start by reshaping my ways of thinking about it.

It’s an uphill battle though. From the beginning of my year in the woods, I knew that I wasn’t interested in primitive skills.

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In many ways, what I’m looking for could be called “a sense of place.” In the past few days, on a few separate occasions (including a comment on my last post), that phrase has popped up, and I find it very evocative.

Here is what I want.

I want a sense of place. I want to feel connected, deep down to my bones, to a people: a family, a circle of friends and acquaintances, a community. I want to feel connected to the land, to the plants and animals and birds, to the geography. I want to know the stories of these people and places, not just the cold facts. I want to know and be part of the history, and have it actually be relevant, and see why it matters to me personally. I want to belong.

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Even when I began acupuncture school, I was actually quite skeptical about whether or not Chinese medicine really works. All of my thinking, and all of my experience, revolved around Western medicine and Western medical concepts — things that are embedded in our everyday life — so I had no basis for thinking otherwise. Consequently, it all seemed made-up and fake to me.

Things have changed. It has been over a year since I started school. For nearly that entire length of time, I’ve done qigong, had regular acupuncture treatments, taken herbs and whole-food nutritional supplements, had energy healing done, and worked hard to patch energy leaks that I’ve noticed in my thoughts and behaviors. Almost every one of these things is considered fraudulent by the scientific orthodoxy, and yet the results are unmistakable: My energy has improved by a rough estimate of thirty percent from last August.

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I’m trying to see what path I want to travel for my future.

One basic thing I am aware of is the inevitability of societal collapse due to resource shortage. While the data and reasoning I’ve read show this as all but certain, my approach to it is not.

I could bury my head in the sand like most people. Deny that the age of oil is coming to an end, keep driving and using gas like there’s no tomorrow. But I would really prefer not to.

The other extreme is to work like crazy to get ready for a sudden collapse in a few years. I know people who are doing this, who believe in a worst-case scenario not only within our lifetimes, but within the decade.

In either case it feels short-sighted, and not well-integrated into an understanding of living in the world in the long term. So I don’t choose either. The problem is that I don’t really have an understanding of the world that would help inform me about the other alternatives. I grew up upper middle class, and I spent some time with primitivists. So those two have been my only options.

Interesting thing is, in some ways, they form two sides of the same coin. If too entrenched or calcified, they can define each other, becoming a civilized/primitive dichotomy.

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I recently read an article by one of my favorite “post-civilization” writers, John Michael Greer. His writings show clear, balanced, incisive, and deep thinking and generally explicate positions that resonate with me. He thinks in terms of magic as well as post-civilization living, a synthesis that is of great interest to me.

Greer wrote this essay as a personal e-mail and then gave permission for it to be circulated. It is a response to a book titled Globalize Liberation, which I haven’t read but I gather is an anthology of various writings. The recipient of this e-mail wrote a chapter in that book, which you can read here (but I didn’t, and understood this essay just fine).

I decided to reproduce Greer’s article in its entirety, despite its length, in part to remind myself to return to it, because there are a lot of great ideas in it that I haven’t yet begun to assimilate.

If you are interested, you can also read it here with an introduction:
http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=523

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