Lake Eola, Birds & Cookies, Broken Hearts, The Robot Theory & My Screwy Life Plans

Lake Eola

It’s amazing how even a devastated environment can have the coolest shit to learn from. Swans are trippy. They do this crazy synchronized dance and they hiss. Also, the babies are… well. I wanted to die. Also, birds are just by nature the funniest creatures on the earth in my experience so far. I thought Rissa was going to die from laughing at these creatures. We saw mostly birds. We watched them from one spot for almost two hours. Way better than a movie. (Though Coraline was awesome.)

I’m a Dork

Weirdoes

Trippy Dance

Cuteness.

Black Sawn and Baby

Spear-Face Bird Gots a Fish

The Summarized Adventures of Wolf and Cougar in the Chicago Puddle of Wilderness

Intimate Intelligence

I’m back in Chicago, and it was a drastic change from being in the mountains of WA with two fairly calm adults, occasionally seeing Portland, to a household of crazy children all talking over each other and people running around like mad and seeing downtown which is basically a huge concrete blob. And now I’m waiting for afternoon to roll around so I can meet mah friend Silly Cougar AKA Rissa at the airport. (Okay, no one calls her Silly Cougar but me, and only on certain occasions, but I like saying “Lazy Wolf and Silly Cougar.”)

Drums and Spirits

I’ve been thinking a lot about an intense experience I had at my dad’s in Deland, Florida, with the trees. I won’t go into more detail because it was so damn incredible that for it to be ridiculed or shared with the wrong people would screw with me. But it reminded me of an experience I had before that, in middle school, that I can share.

Lack of Nature is the Lack of Symbols

I started reading books about psychology, stories, symbols and dreams when I was in the eighth grade. Most of what I’ve read references Jung at some point, and the best books told many stories (usually some version of a story found in an oral tradition) to show what was being discussed. Ever since this part of my life, when I read so many stories rich in symbolism, my dreams, as if fed, became quite intense. The imagery became more and more natural, and saturated, and I very rarely any more have one of those dreams that you can easily dismiss as “my brain is weird.” My dreams since then, both because of the exposure to rich symbols and my widened conscious understanding of the psychology and intimacy of symbols, have become guides to me, almost always, without question.

Weird-Ass Synchronicities

So, this is going to be a short entry. But basically, growing up in Orlando killed my sense that I would ever have a real community. Recently my friend Rissa found a website, rewild.info, and I’ve been looking at the forums, and some people’s blogs, and some of the things said, and a lot of the use of language, I really never expected to see outside of my own brain or conversations with Rissa. Hopefully this means I’m under exposed to the communities I really want to find and not that it’s truly this rare to find, but I imagine it’s somewhere in between. Of course just about everyone on those forums has skills I’ve only fantasized about even reading in depth about, much less really learning.

Fortunately, there’s a lot of “rewilding” in Portland, where I’ll be going to school in the fall. Hell fuckin’ yes. I really want to learn to do things rather than spew about them, and I think, if there is any city where I can do that (as opposed to the middle of the woods where I’d rather be), that city is Portland.