Not sure if i'll ever rewild

 i'm pretty conditioned. there are habits, expectations, stereotypes and comfort levels within me that i had very little control over. ignorance and irresponsibility allowed them to flourish within me and all that does is make it easier for these conditionings to propagate elsewhere. i harbor infectious diseases upon which societies build civilizations. i've been tamed and tricked. i doubt this can be reversed but the awareness of these conditionings forces me to become accountable, responsible, for them because my ignorance has diminished for a moment. 
in order to truly rewild i'd need to remove all civilized conditions, expectations of self and others, stereotypical/oppressive thinking and privilege. once all those are gone i'd need to step naked into the wild with whatever innate skills i may possess and not just survive but thrive.
i don't think i can do this. of the conditions i'm aware of the must be a thousand i'll never look at.
so i have another idea. i see myself going feral for periods of time. like your housecat that vanishes for a week and comes back with evidence of fighting. from then on there is a dead chipmunk, mouse or lizard on your doormat. your cat telling you something, "i'm your pet, and sometimes i like being just that, but i don't need you. i can leave and enjoy that too.  remember that."

going feral, at this point in my life, seems not only more feasible but more necessary. leave for a time, eat roadkill elk, snared bunnies, sour dock and chokecherry. sleep underr a juniper and use the prickly pear for sunscreen. then comeback. either because weariness and thirst has bested me or because i can’t wait to explain how i tracked that cougar, found its treed kill and took my share.

going feral is the best i can do right now. not all my friends are primitives, very few are. the ones i love most may never spin cordage or pull a bowstring. sharing my life with them drives me. walking thru hollywood with my high school buddy gets me all giddy with overstimulus.

i like coming back with stuff to share. with a sunburn and the odor of animal. i like coming back to ignorance too. to deliberately forget that there is wildness still in me and give in to the conditionings. smile with them for awhile but always leave the lizard on the doormat.

i don’t know, i should go dancing or something

maybe rewilding would have been a better title for the site, because the -ing suggests a process, not an endpoint. but just plain “Rewild” is kind of like a suggestive term, for those who hadn’t really considered it.

Sounds like you are doing fine to me. I can count on two hands the interweb peoples who could skin a rabbit. Myself, Willem, Urban Scout, and now you. Oh that’s one hand, but I"m sure there are a few peoplpe I’m forgetting.

Keep rockin’ dude, remember, it’s a journey, not a destination!

Tony

I don’t ever use or think about the word rewild or rewilding personally. I’m just me, doing my thing. Maybe I don’t feel un-wild. But not because I live in the woods or know I have the skills to survive there (and speaking of going feral Cat Scratch Fever is playing on the radio right now). I just don’t see it as this gulf where someday when I’m good enough to add my own pressure release to the 467 or whatever it is then I will earn a black belt in being wild. I don’t think you have to leave everything behind to be wild. I mean eventually I hope there will be no civilization to come back to but as long as it is there, and that is where your friends and family are, and there is still work to do in bringing it down and/or healing the earth so things aren’t so shitty when it does collapse…On the other hand I see no shame in running completely away now. Many people seem to but not me. I say if that is what you want to do go for it. If you can deliver us a pokeberry message on birchbark on how it’s going once in a while that would be helpful, but if not…

Maybe the other thing is that I’ve built up so much momentum towards rewilding that there seems to be no turning back at this point. I don’t have to try too hard. This even though I’m addicted as anyone to the comforts of civilization. Especially as I’ve gotten older (the ripe old age of 24) and my health and resilience has deteriorated. I freak out when thinking about sleeping outdoors. It’s cold! The ground is hard! It’s wet! But I figure those addictions would quickly drop away in a situation where my life was at stake and in the meantime I’ll work them away slowly. Basically I’ll go on a fast from civilization if and when it comes to that, but a diet in the meantime. Times when I was “forced” to live outdoors I adjusted within three weeks. More adaptable people would likely adjust much quicker. (I’m the sort of person who gets physically ill when taken out of my comfort zone like when staying at a friends house or going to the city for a weekend).

Ha ha. i think I have a much more cushy conception of rewilding than you guys may have.

For me, rewilding means not just withdrawing from the mechanical arms of mother culture, but also running back to the arms of friends and family. Of behaving fully, truly, wholly human, the way we did tribally for 3 million years.

It sounds like implied in your statements that the rewilding idea (with or without endpoint) involves survivalism, living off the land without any group support, a skill associated with native scouts and certain extremely nomadic peoples.

Have you seen any pictures of the inside of a period plains indian tipi? The piles of furs, the tea water on the boil, the dried foods for snacks, the entire family in there?

Also, what about the many many peoples of the Longhouse [EDIT: Think Viking hall! Like in Lord of the Rings, the Golden Hall of the Rohirrim…Native peoples loved big bunkhouses in the cold, wet places of the world), like the Iroquois, the vast diversity of NW Coast Indians, the Huron, etc. They loved their big halls of feasting and communing.

Did you know plains indians gardened corn-beans-squash during the buffalo hunting off-season? They’d then leave their gardens behind for the hunting season, and come back to harvest.

These people knew how to live fat. Not civilized fat, but old-school FAT.

I see my life only getting cushier as I rewild into the arms of human support, delicious foods, comfortable dwellings, etc.

I wonder sometimes if Tom Brown’s Scout ideal has skewed the conception of rewilding.

Perhaps we all rewild differently, as simple as that.

awesome. community community community

I wonder sometimes if Tom Brown's Scout ideal has skewed the conception of rewilding.

I think in a few people it has. I’ve heard student’s of The Tracker School mention that after the crash* (They presume the crash is going to happen in a short period, say maybe a month to a year) that I will be able to find them in their scout pits.

Take care,

Curt

• Good read here about a possible slow crash:

http://ranprieur.com/essays/slowcrash.html

I do believe in group support and in thrival- as opposed to survival, but I also think there is a certain amount of discomfort invovled in breaking the chains so to speak. The learning curve can be a bitch (drippy or smoky! shelters, fires that fail to light, and traps that just won’t work) and even with a tipi full of buffalo skins I know that after sleeping in a 70 degree room my modern nose will still get nippy at night 'til I get used to it. Doing it alone for many of us is not an attempt to be more scoutlike but consequence of not having any local support. I don’t exactly enjoy people–social phobic here–goes a long way towards explaining internet addiction. Besides the friends I do have just like stay up late and get drunk in the bar…not get drunk and go tracking in the middle of the afternoon like I do.

I watched a documentary on feral children today and I question whether I would ever even be able to adapt to a life of full of intimate tribal support after being “neglected” in this modern society.

I watched a documentary on feral children today and I question whether I would ever even be able to adapt to a life of full of intimate tribal support after being "neglected" in this modern society.

What documentary did you watch?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsfvSWljqpc

I’m probably just exaggerating, but I do relate a little. Sometimes I feel like I missed the boat on being able to connect with other humans…I didn’t talk to the other kids at school or use a telephone until age 13. No reason. Just didn’t.

Curt, I’m a big fan of Ran’s Slow Crash picture as well. I think it’s the most realistic concept of the crash I’ve read.

Penny, I love the term “thrival”. It does fit well with what Willem is reminding us about the piles of furs and the embrace of the family that is embraced by the tribe.

In Participating in Nature, Elepel says (in chiding himself) that only a modern abo would be naive enough to think that he cold live on a mountain all by himself.

Rewilding is about gaining back all the things that civilization has spent the last 10 millenia robbing from us: a relationship with the rest of life on this planet, an identity as human animals living in human herds, traditions that can outlast 10 millenia because they have been refined by all of our ancestors.

Chimps don’t have an instinct that tells them to poke a stick into a buggy hole in a tree to get the bugs out to eat–they learn it from their tribe. I want that power back.

No more locks on the food and the home and the security and the knowledge.

Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but I doubt I’ll ever be “fully rewilded” either. Though, I think a more accurrate statement would be: I doubt that I’ll ever be a full and complete member of a “fully rewilded” community/tribe. You teens & twenty-somethings might get to see that before you die of old age (maybe), but I suspect I’m going to be well past my expiration date by the time things have truly gotten to that point. The sticking point is the community. Don’t get me wrong, what we’re doing here is great, but at some point it’s going to have to be off the 'net and we’re going to have to take the communities we’re physically in and help to form new, rewilded ones. I just don’t think that’s a process that will be “complete” in my lifetime.

After all, you can’t give birth to a baby with 9 women in just one month…

And as far as not relating or connecting to other people, well, a few of my teenage years I’d often only speak a few times a week. Oddly, that changed dramatically when I went to college…

I see it like this that if one has come this far one has already begun. I don’t see any end or beginning to my rewilding experience. Shoot! I wouldn’t ever want this to end. I like it too much to want it to end. Peace.

As an extreme social phobic and as someone who has essentially grown up as a hermit and still mostly am a hermit, I do not think I would be able to completely adapt either; in fact I don’t even find the idea of tribal living to be 100 percent desirable. The whole emphasis on tribal living conflicts with two other things I place enormous value upon: namely, privacy and autonomy.

I don’t take rewilding too seriously. I practice primitive skills, but I don’t see it in the context of “rewilding” It’s like the difference between many intentional communities and ones that form “organically”.

There’s a certain irony that hermit folks can get into primitive living not because of a desire for a close-knit tribal existence, but the exact opposite (a desire to be free from dependence on a civilised system that demands human contact to a certain level). As a hermitically-inclined rewilder myself I often feel I’m in this for the “wrong reason” when I hear people discussing the finer points of tribal intimacy… although I don’t really disagree with it. If I had been raised in a primitive tribe rather than the artificialist straitjacket of civilised society I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have grown up to be such a recluse today. How’s that for a catch-22 situation…

Our modern social interactions are a bit fucked up. Full of pretension and lies and other bullshit.

The tribe’s social bond is small and very close knit. There isn’t much reason to be shy because you know everyone so well. Today in our mass society we meet strange people everyday and are expected to act totally open and comfortable around them. This in my opinion goes against our nature to regard strangers with suspicion.

Indeed, my original motivation for a “primitive” lifestyle several years ago had more to do with am lifelong series of catastrophic social failures than any genuine beef I had with consumerism, capitalism, environmental concerns, or the like (any criticisms I did have were also a facade for socialization problems), as I see many people are. I defined “freedom” in terms of how much I had to rely on other people to sustain myself.

I think it is true, though, that had I a “tribal” upbringing I would have an intrinsic desire to live life within the confines of the tribe and that I would derive pleasure from tribal activities… but because of my warped upbringing I neither experience a desire nor do I experience pleasure from my short stints in “tribal” settings.

If I had been raised in a primitive tribe rather than the artificialist straitjacket of civilised society I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have grown up to be such a recluse today. How's that for a catch-22 situation...

My thoughts exactly. High five to my fellow hermits and social phobes. (What would happen if you put us all together?!)I’ve been in contact with some of my old friends recently and have some fishing and wilderness play dates set up but it takes a toll on my psyche. Just thinking about all this social interaction to come I want to curl up in a ball and go to sleep.
I can fool myself and say I don’t talk to people because we don’t have the same interests but the truth is they ARE interested at least in camping, fishing, hunting and the like if not the more hardcore primtive skills, it just makes me uncomfortable being around people. It’s bad because if I am dating someone, once I get comfortable around them they are the only person I hang out with. I don’t know if I would ever get comfortable around a tribe. In wilderness classes and the like I tend to be a loner and an observer whereas you will immediately see the others form alliances and close friendships based on what seems like nothing, perhaps because they arrived on the same bus, or happened to sit next to eachother (can you hear my antisocial skepticism peeking through?). I’ve had roommates that I still felt awkward around after months and months. On the other hand roommates are not people you depend on for your food and shelter and well-being.

But I don’t ever get the feeling that I am in it for the wrong reasons. There are so many good reasons. I’m not in it primarily for the tribe OR to escape humans. If I had to chose one thing it would probably be the well-being of the earth and of the plants and animals (former environmental studies major here). I suspect a person who doesn’t get along with people very well may have the ability to have a heightened relationship with other life forms. Kind of like those autistic people who know what animals are thinking or a blind person who can hear really well.

perhaps because they arrived on the same bus, or happened to sit next to eachother (can you hear my antisocial skepticism peeking through?).

Actually, that’s called a granfalloon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon

huh. granfalloon. interesting.

I know where I belong in a sense and where I feel most comfortable. I try to avoid situation in which I might stay uncomfortable like resturants without an organic menu or visisting the mall…i’d get bored in those senorios I just don’t go to places like that anymore. People who know we would understand. I enjoy rewilding. I enjoy organic and mostly wild menus. I dig wild roots more than farmed ones, unless I know the farmer and what they feed the root. I try to put myself around people that I “bet” I have something I like in common with them and I don’t need to stick around if I get bored or have finished what I came for. Why spoil a good experience by doing something I don’t want to do? No body in MY crowd would want me to do that so why do it in this NEW crowd, if they don’t like me for me than fuck’em:) So, in certain social situations I don’t relate much with anyone, because I don’t go camping; I go beyond camping; I don’t hike; I beyond hike or epathetically traveling in the woods. I understand I only relate with some people the way I want to relate with people, but I don’t care that I understand that. I general like what I have in common with other rewilders and that alone gives me enough reason to give them a chance and myself a chance to have this alternate support.