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.)

Birds & Cookies

So I’ve been reading A Language Older Than Words. I was sitting with my friend Rissa by Barnes & Noble the other day. There was a crushed cookie on the ground by her foot and this funny bouncy little bird was hovering around, turning her head in that weird twitchy bird way at the cookie and then at us and then at the cookie. (I’m assuming she because we saw a few birds and this one had the more plain camouflage friendly markings.) After a few minutes she was standing there and I said calmly, “we really don’t care if you take the cookie.” Within two seconds she looked at me and grabbed it. Of course then another bird leaped at her so she didn’t get it, but it was really cool anyway.

The Robot Theory

I’ve been thinking a lot about how when I was little for a while I was convinced that I was the only real person around and everyone else was a robot, and I was part of an experiment by aliens. (It’s okay to laugh.) But I find most people I tell that have a similar story, and that is kind of disturbing. In what kind of culture do generally very empathetic children suddenly fear everyone else is inanimate? Their parents, friends, family? Most people would dismiss this as a phase but I really don’t think this is natural, it was scary and feels artificial, like a response to a slow, drawn-out, subtle attack.

I’d love to know if anyone has anything like that to share because I’m really curious about it and plan on pondering and writing about it some more.

My Screwy Life Plans

Right NOW the plan is to stay in Florida and go to UCF and work on an Environmental Studies degree, because I get the Florida Bright Futures scholarship and thus automatically get 75% off of college. Meanwhile, I’m saving money from my part time job so I can hopefully take a semester or year off of college to do an outdoor/wilderness school intensive. (By the way if anyone who happens to read this knows of any really good ones, leave me comments with links. I have one in mind but not many people are accepted each year and I have a year or two to find a bunch so I have options. Cheaper end and housing solutions are all very good things…) Then I’ll go back and finish my degree, and then move to the west coast, probably Portland. If this plan sticks? NO idea. I’m insane. I gave up on believing I’d follow through with any plans. And I think honestly I’ll get more done that way…

I’m visiting my family in Chicago soon. I want to visit Portland before too long, for a week or two. I miss it there. Hell, even though I didn’t start to get a social life until right after I decided I needed to leave for financial reasons, it was fun… people are so much friendlier there, if you walk outside on a saturday you’re bombarded with WEIRDNESS at every step. It was so much fun. At least it was when I dragged my ass outta the apartment, haha. If I had the financial means I would be there right now. But 75% off college and no rent if I stay in FL  when I have no money to take wilderness education? Yeah. I’m going to be here for a while.

Honestly, the idea of going to college bores and disturbs me. However since I’m getting that insane scholarship and it may very well help me financially in the future – and may help people not dismiss me as a psychotic delusional hippie – I’m doing it while I have nothing better to do (or, rather, nothing better to do that I can afford). And  when I get into the classes that are actually environmental studies stuff maybe I’ll meet some interesting people. Maybe. It’d be nice. I’m socially retarded as is, seriously, and Florida is lacking in the kind of… uh… subculture(?) that I get along easily with. Most people I meet annoy me. It’s mostly a flaw on a cultural level, but on a personal level, I’m just really judgmental and impatient and easy to annoy. That with my tendency to get lost in my head and be very quiet makes networking a lot harder than it is for many people. Quiet, awkward, AND picky? Sheesh.

Things have been hard lately but I think this is kind of like a new beginning, the breaking into pieces before I can reassemble my weird brain and weird heart into a less dysfunctional pattern and they might actually mend back together in a healthier way. Maybe. I hope so. I think so.

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.”)

Yesterday morning when I woke up, like I often do without being too much bothered by it, to the high school child getting up at the crack of dawn to go to school, I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I got up and took Ty (below: isn’t he cute?) on a walk/run and was about to go into the forest but realized there were deer standing right there and decided I didn’t trust Ty to react calmly to them.

So I waltzed on back, got my camera, tied my shoes to my belt loop, and returned to the sliver of wilderness alone without the spastic border collie. It’s good my relatives live near the “woods” – even if it is like… basically just a pathway flanked by some trees. It’s enough to feel immersed for a little while.

I have no skills. Really, I’m new to the whole idea of rewilding in any sense of the word. I mean I’ve always had the idea in the back of my head, but it didn’t occur to me to pursue it with any seriousness until Rissa showed me a few websites with people actually doing cool shit. I’ve only taken one class on edible plants ever in my life and never on anything else. So this was sort of an experimental day.

I saw a few critters and a LOT of prints. It was awesome. I didn’t see the deer again, which made me sad, but I’ll never forget the time I went there with my cousin Aislinn and we ran into a young buck with a baby. I nearly died I was quaking with girly squirms over how cute it was. And it seemed odd to me to see a buck with a fawn… I don’t know enough about deer to know if that’s super unusual but it was cool.

Anyway, it’s the first time in a while I have even a little bit “immersed” myself in the trees. It’s amazing how even with no skill set, just taking the time to walk barefoot and pay attention changes your thought process within twenty minutes. Walking back to the house through the streets was bizarre, to say the least (not to mention the looks I got for being barefoot and covered in mud).

I started noticing small animals, tracks, how the ground felt different by different kinds of trees, how the earth was wetter or dryer or harder or softer, how flies just about took over some areas and you couldn’t see them in others, where different plants grew, which way the wind was blowing… and for a while I felt like I belonged there. A lot more than I felt like I belonged in the neighborhood. Your eyes start to look at things differently and you stop categorizing things so immediately and just listen. And that’s where I learn what human intelligence is at its best – intimate.

I also found some sadness, though. Where I went really is a sliver of wild left in the middle of a huge city. It’s hard to see in the picture below, but I found what looks a lot like gasoline in the mud, which means it’s in the water. I had to turn around there because the only way to go was through mud shining like a oily rainbow and I just have a feeling being barefoot in that isn’t the wisest of choices.

It made me really, really sad. More sad than usual, too, because of the state of mind I was in. And angry.

And I ran into these … canada geese? I think? They made lots of noise. LOTS of noise. After they quieted down (I dunno what they were honking about, I know nothing about geese, but I’m glad to say they just sort of acknowledged me and then accepted my presence.) I sat and sang to them (or, well, mostly to myself) and they just sort of looked at me.

And this is me being a dork:

Anyway, long disjointed story short, this was the most therapeutic thing I have done in ages. I got an (admittedly small) small taste of my brain switching over into a place that is completely contradictory to the way we live, and a lot healthier. It was a good reminder of who I am

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.

My dad is a percussionist, mainly hand drums, mostly Djembe. I used to go to his classes since I was there (then unfortunately I hit a retarded time in my life in high school and missed out on a lot of free drumming and dancing classes because I’m RETARDED), and I got decent enough that he used me to keep the rhythm when we had beginners. (I still miss that. I haven’t touched a drum in so long – I bled on my drum, too, which apparently is like… a bonding rite with it. It’s probably mad at me… I’m so… lethargic… it’s so… lame…)

But anyway, apparently sometimes if acoustics are just right, and you’re standing in just the right place… and probably also if you’re in the right state of mind… sometimes a drum circle can do some CRAZY thing with harmonics and you actually hear “human” voices. From the drums. As a collective.

I got really lucky to experience this (no one else in the room heard it, though.) I was dumb enough to stop drumming for a minute in shock, but it didn’t interrupt it, thank god. It was gorgeous. I have no way to describe it. The rhythm was speaking, it was singing, through dead wood and animal hide. It was beautiful. It was a flowing, deep, watery singing. Watery harsh and deep though, more like the ocean than a stream. It was incredible. I remember that moment in such joy because it’s one of the experiences that I can share and also confirmed so much life for me. People, using materials of dead tree and animal, sitting together in a circle, without even realizing what they were doing, created this life, this joyful singing, this reminder of where we come from and how joyful human nature can be, how joyful nature can be. Whoever tries to tell you that living in a box is more joyful than living in the trees is insecure or trying to sell you.

We may have been in a room, but we were using some of the oldest human tools, and even older kinds of flesh: of tree and animal. Those things are not new. They are not “progress.” But they helped me much. It’s really good that it happened, too – I was in a really, really bad stage of life. I was masochistic, recoiled, reclusive beyond quiet into the realms of vicious, and hated almost everything. I mean, people think I’m uncommunicative now… jesus, if only they had seen me then.

And then that! I wrote about it, and it was likely one of the few joyful things I had written in forever. I wrote that the drums spoke to me. It was just… incredible. One of those things you know will affect you forever, whether you think of it often or barely at all.

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.

Also around that time I started developing a huge interconnected web of characters in my head. At first I was going to do a graphic novel about them (and I imagine any stories I finish will have to involve them), but recently they’ve become more and more just part of how I process the world around me, how I understand it. They help explain beauty and dysfunction in a more honest, intimate way.

I noticed, recently, something vital about all of these old stories that sparked my dreams and my general symbolic awareness: they intimately involve things that are nonhuman, or at the very least things that are human that we don’t like dealing with in “civilized” conversation.

I always get puzzled when people tell me about dreams like, “Well I lost my shoes.”
“And?”
“Well I never found my shoes.”

Not that I can possibly judge dreams, but it’s always strange to me simply because of the intensity of the mythology in my dreams. I think the most intense single dream I’ve had I ended up calling “Fire In the Head,” where ultimately I was shot in the head by a half-dead man who had half the face of an old man and half a face made out of raw brain matter, in the shape of his face. When I died he told me I had a week to be a ghost and figure out what my life was about (to oversimplify), and then I would be tested, to see if I could move on to the next realm. Not dinner conversation for most. However I found this to be an intense warning. I had a lot of help from my dad in interpreting this dream initially, which helped, but I think in the end the only person who can really know what a dream means is the person who experienced it, because if you figure it out, you’ll feel when it strikes close to home. And this dream warned me of something terrifying that I am still struggling with: The man who shot me was a warning; and old man, an exposed brain, signs of over-intellectualizing, well, everything, including joy. And it killed me, and in my ghost form, my transition, I have a chance to move on from that. I’m still in transition.

Actually, I’ve had a lot of ghost dreams. A particularly terrifying series of them started after the first time I watched The Wall. And except for these dreams and childhood dreams I don’t remember, I don’t have nightmares. But these dreams were scary.

My favorite protection in these dreams was the transformation of a dog I grew up with into a fox charm. We were in “the spirit room,” everything morphed, and she became a fox charm around my neck. My anima, I suppose, my protector and guide. Which shows how connected I have been to the canine world in my life – I only lived without dogs around for 3 years in high school, only during weekdays. I grew up around that energy.

But anyway to the reason I actually wrote this. I was thinking how we, as civilized people, more and more don’t interact with anything nonhuman. We interact with domesticated animals (though I have to say, having pets did wonders for me in my childhood, as opposed to seeing no creatures other than humans in my family), even man made ground. Our stimulation comes from man made objects, electronics. We even put fake stimulating mobiles over our baby’s heads at night, give them “educational television,” and all sorts of man-made everything.

I think this limits our story telling immensely, and our understanding of everything, which allows us to stay so monumentally fucked up. You can’t justify clear cutting and destroying entire communities of coyotes if you believe that Coyote threw up the stars. But you can if you believe that the world was made by a single entity for one specifies of billions, it’s easy to see how fucked up and egotistical a culture – a mythology – can become.

I mean, I haven’t met very many wild creatures. And it saddens me; my experience of the world is limited. Part of the reason I’m excited to be moving to a place that has a lot of “rewilding” is because I hope to be competent in skills that will help me interact with the real world, not the fake one we have devised. I want to be able to see eye to eye – or as close as I’m gonna get abiding by the rules I was born into – with things that are not in my image. I also hate monotheism for this reason, the simple fact that it excludes so many little “gods” and limits mythology, but that’s another rant altogether, though closely related.

I mean, what better way to appreciate this earth than to truly interact with what little wilderness is left? That’s what I hate about fake hippies and new agie people. They do the goddes earth worship dance, and THEN they run inside and eat donuts and talk about global warming. Actually my mom hangs out with some of these people, and while they were inside I was running around barefoot in the grass and giggling. Oddly enough I was the only human out there. (Not to be insulting to people who acknowledge global warming and study old mythologies; but really, if you want to worship the earth, you have to acknowledge it with your body. I’m mostly talk at this point and I’m aware of that, but I’m going to change it, and at least I like the bare earth under my feet.)

I’m not sure how to make this idea concise or better understood, so I’m just gonna stop and hope I eventually get some feedback once I get this blog out to my few buddies and my hopefully more to-be buddies across the internet and people I meet when I move.

Oh – last night I could not sleep because I was immensely frustrated, I actually wrote an entry I ended up deleting because I felt whiney, but I was honestly, genuinely frustrated enough I was sitting in bed glaring and ready to start kicking things, and then I went outside for a few minutes. My dad has 6 acres in the mountains in south WA, and so I stood outside, my feet so cold they hurt, and listened to the sound of running water and it was the most relaxing thing I could have done. The moon was reflecting brightly in the water, and just a speck of bright white was visible in the woods among the pitch black of the trees’ shadows. Even the rooster that apparently talks all night seemed more part of things than it usually does. It’s no wonder we’re all insane – most people can’t walk out to that. Hell, there are probably places devastated enough they’d have to risk their lives to get somewhere with that kind of beauty.

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.