“If you are here because you feel sorry for me, you are wasting your time, but if you are here because your life and destiny are linked with mine, then we will make a difference…”

Once, quite a few years ago, I spent Thanksgiving day with a group of young activists on the Navajo reservation. We were there working with an organization based out of Boulder Colorado, called the “Traditional Support Caravan”. The Caravan takes supplies (food, mostly) to traditional Navajo elders resisting being relocated from their ancestral lands.

Yes, this is happening still. To this very day.

The elders there are being pressured to relocate to make way for a coal mine that is slowly working its way toward them. And the coal mine’s purpose, of course, is to supply electricity to the western U.S. power grid.

While we were down there, a few of us had the honor of spending a week with an 80 year old widowed Navajo woman named Ida Clinton. She was half deaf, and blind in one eye. She lived in a small cabin, and lived mostly by herding sheep and gardening. She still cared for one of her daughters (now over 50 years old herself) who was born developmentally disabled. Her extended relatives came and visited her quite a few times while I was there (it seemed as though everyone around there was related to Ida — her “clan sisters” and “brothers”, as she called them).

Hauling supplies.

Ida had never signed a piece of paper in her life, and was adamant that she never would. She also didn’t have electricity at her place, and when asked about that, said she saw no need for it.

During our stay with Ida, she insisted on cooking for us, even though we had brought our own food. Over the week, I saw the very same flour and oil that we had given her being used to make the fry-bread that she served us.

She told us stories — rich & playful stories from her own experiences — stories that showed courage and resourcefulness in the face of adversity, and spoke to the solid connections she had to the land and her people.

We fixed a gate on her horse stable, chopped firewood, and shoveled some sheep manure.  (I was awarded an “honorary MD” by one of Ida’s nephews…the “MD” stood for Manure Digger.)  All in all, we felt really good about ourselves and what we had done to “help” this “poor” Navajo woman.

After driving the 12+ hours back to Denver (where I was living at the time), I found myself speeding into the suburbs just after dusk. Endless rows of apartments and suburban houses awaited me, and since it was now after thanksgiving, many of the houses had their Christmas lights out. I remember thinking how ironic those lights seemed now, knowing that the power to light them came from the coal that was destroying Ida’s home.

Shoveling.

I remember thinking how Ida had no electricity in her cabin, and how she could see no need for it.

Then I walked into my suburban house and flicked on the light switch.

And a thought occurred to me: how many times do I need to flick that switch before I’ve fed more of my energy (in the form of money paying the electric bill) to that coal mine than I just fed to Ida (in the form of flour and oil and shoveled sheep-dung)?

And then a second thought occurred to me; was Ida a poor woman for her lack of electricity or was I a poor man for my need of it? The life I had seen Ida living (while it had its share of problems, and seemed hard in many ways) was intimately connected and rich with experience. Her daily relationships included contact with the fundamental necessities of life, her extended clan family, and the land. In many ways, Ida’s life had reminded me of the early childhood I had experienced on a homestead in rural Alaska.

I saw how Ida’s life had given her a resourcefulness, playfulness, and aliveness-of-spirit that I had rarely encountered in people half her age. The suburbs waiting for my return appeared stifling and lonely by contrast. The big city of Denver was a long ways from the homestead I had grown up on, and I knew my adult life now included very little that would have been important to Ida.

Herding sheep.

Since that day, I’ve slowly come to see that we are only in solidarity with native people when we re-connect with what it means to have our “life and destiny” linked with theirs.  What it means to live connected.  Simply put, I don’t think the world needs any more white helpers, no matter how right (or left) their politics may be. What the world needs is more people who know who they are the way Ida knows who she is.

I can’t speak for Ida, but I can say that Ida’s relationships and her way of relating (to adversity, to others, to the land) told me who she was.

It’s a shame that the Lakota phrase “all our relations” has become something of a new-age slogan.  Because it’s not a slogan, new age or otherwise.

Maybe, just maybe…it’s a way of living?

Alaskan Mosquitoes, in abundance.

Often when folks find out I’m into primitive living in places like the Northwoods of Wisconsin or the Interior of Alaska, one of the first questions they ask me is “How do you deal with mosquitoes?” Or “What’s the best natural mosquito repellent?”

For a long time I was unsure how to answer, there didn’t seem to be one simple replacement for DEET. But it finally dawned on me.

Now I say “woodsmoke.”

While enjoying a winter in an earth-lodge in the Northwoods of Wisconsin (Ojibwe terrirory, where the food grows on the water — i.e. where wild rice lives), I was taught (won’t say “I learned”) the art of the smokeless fire. That art is very important if one is going to live long with an open fire inside one’s lodge. It’s mostly achieved by using the right species of hardwood (maple works pretty good), very dry, in finger and thumb sized pieces, over a hearth that has a good air intake coming up from underneath. Lots of air, with dry, small pieces of hardwood, and you’ve got a nice smokeless fire fit for magical evenings in a primitive lodge.

But you could sit next to that same kind of fire outside in June and get eaten alive by sister mosquito.

So when it comes to being outside in the first half of the Alaskan summer, I’ll take a smokey fire any day. In the Boreal forest of Alaska, a good cloud of woodsmoke will drive away mossies better than a whole can of Deet.

It makes sense if you think about it. Every summer large parts of the Boreal forest burn. In Alaska, the average is somewhere around 100,000 acres. But it’s all okay. In fact, it’s for the best. Spruce almost seems to know this. They grow in such a way that they literally become tinderboxes, and the older they get, the more of a tinderbox the woods become. It’s a wonderful gift really — anyone who has ever been in desperate need of a warm fire in the middle of a cold Alaskan winter knows how awesome Spruce is.  And how easy it can be to get dry kindling that lights up with a single match (or even easier with a touch of birch bark). It’s almost as if Spruce wants to burn.

Friends enjoying woodsmoke while working on a primitive lodge in Alaska.

And interestingly enough, Spruce is the climax tree species in the Alaskan interior. The woods may start out with Aspen or Cottonwoods or Birch, but eventually they wind up Spruce. So if Spruce didn’t burn every summer, that’s pretty much all we would have up here. Instead, spruce creates the conditions for it’s own demise. And when it burns it feeds the soil so Aspens or Cottonwoods or Birch can grow next. But if you’ll walk into most Cottonwood or Birch groves, you’ll find a few slow growing Spruce in there. Eventually they will take over, and the whole cycle starts again. All because of how Spruce relates to Fire.

So what does that have to do with our little buzzing blood-sucking sisters? Well, to her woodsmoke is bad news. No surprise, really. She can’t tell if that smoke is from a campfire or a forest fire, she just knows it’s bad. And she’s a delicate flier who can’t just “bug out” at a moment’s notice and leave a raging Spruce fire in the dust. So she tends to stay away (a lot like many humans feel about her, I reckon). At least that’s my theory.

So how do you make a smokey fire? Well, you pretty much reverse the skill used in that Northwoods earth-lodge to make a smokeless one. Find some big pieces of damp, marginal-burning wood and stick them on the fire in a way that very little air can get to them. Just don’t over do it. The best zone for smoke is a fire that’s just about to burst into flame, but can’t quite do it yet. If you can find that zone, you can make smoke that will send sister mosquito running for cover.

So it seems there’s more than one way to feed a fire.  And from my own personal experience, many primitive skills are contextual, that is, relative — which is to say they are about relationship. There are very few one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to primitive living. Instead, what works in one place, or in one season, may not work in another. One may learn how to make a smokeless fire inside a winter lodge and then feel like a primitive bad-ass, but then outside during mosquito season a heavy smoke may be just what makes life a pleasure to enjoy.

Smokey construction zone, just like we like it.

So really, the best primitive bug repellent probably isn’t even woodsmoke, it’s more likely contextual knowledge. It’s knowing how to be in an ever-flowing relationship with one’s fellow beings in this big wild world. How to discern what they’re all doing, figure out what might be the best response, and then do it.  At least that’s my theory.

Knowledge: The best replacement for DEET.

Actually, that’s not quite right either…there’s probably even more to the story. But we’ll go there some other time, maybe.  Right now I’ve got friends waiting for me in the woods…and as you may have figured from the pictures, we’re building an earth lodge.

Wild peace,

Glenn

“Clocks slay time…time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”

“You can’t go back.”

“We must go forward.”

Yeah, ok…

…now take a moment, look away from the computer, and think of a pink elephant hovering over your head.

Take another moment and think of the last elephant you saw, whether in Africa, in a zoo, or on T.V..

Now take a third moment and plan a trip to go see an elephant. You can plan to go to Africa on vacation, or plan a trip to the nearest zoo, or just figure on watching Animal Planet tomorrow night. Whatever you want. It’s all good.

But now, stop a moment and consider that those three elephants had in common.

Can you guess?

Yep, he’s imaginary.

You imagined them. In each of those three moments, you used your imagination to create an elephant. All three of those elephants were imaginary.

In fact, right now, when you think back on those three moments, you’re using your imagination. When you think about the past (i.e. the last elephant you saw) or the future (i.e. the next elephant you want to see), you imagine those elephants.

That’s how “time” works. It exists in your imagination. So actually, the “elephant in the room” isn’t even time per se, it’s imagination. Imagination is everywhere. It’s so pervasive in fact, that often we don’t even recognize it. If you stop and really think, it’s incredible to realize how much of what we experience in any given moment is conjured up, or colored over, by our imaginations. It can be hard to tell where sensation stops and imagination starts, in fact. That is the real elephant in the room. But for now, let’s stick with just the topic of time.

If you want to sense something, you have to do it now. Right now is always available to your senses.

The past and future, however, are not available to your senses. They can only be thought. When we imagine the past, we call this “remembering”, but imagining is what we’re doing. And when we imagine the future, these imaginings wind up being even less accurate than our memories (since we imagine the future by extrapolating from memories). Ultimately, that’s how disappointment happens…but more on that some other time, maybe.

In other words, time doesn’t exist except in our heads. And the more we live in the past or the future (i.e. the more we focus our attention on imagining pasts and futures), the more we live in our heads as the world goes by. Because things in the present move. In fact, that’s exactly what clocks do. They move. And “time” is a useful mental construct for coordinating movement. I have a gadget on my wrist that moves predictably, and you have a gadget on your wrist that does the same, and if we want to meet, we coordinate our movements to the movements on our wrists so we can intercept each other.

These guys too.

Ok, so how does all this relate to “primitivism”?

Well, in lots of ways. But one is that people are often fond of telling primitivists they “want to live in the stone age” and that obviously “you can’t go back to the stone age.” Heck, some primitivists will even use this language. And sometimes for convenience, I even say such things.

But ultimately, it’s all bull.

Present reality is a bit more simple. Stones exist. Right now. So the “stone age” hasn’t gone anywhere. All that’s changed is how (most) humans choose to use stones at any given moment.

Right now, in the Amazon jungle there are people who use stone tools. Right now, in various parts of the world I have friends who make and use stone tools. Are these people “living in the stone age?” I can’t speak for the folks in the Amazon, but most of my friends around the world who make and use stone tools also have watches, and their watches say about the same thing mine does.

And I’m pretty sure if you gave a watch to one of those folks in the Amazon, it would continue to tick along about the same as back when it belonged to you.

Any one of us is perfectly capable of putting down a steel knife and picking up a rock, breaking (i.e. knapping) it into a stone blade, and using it to cut something. We can then put down that stone blade, and pick up our steel knife again. We can do all this without resorting to time travel. The notion that time travels in just one direction is an illusion. Everything moves in the present — and things move all over the place. Mostly they move round and round.

The “stone age” never went anywhere. It’s at your feet, right now.

All you have to do is reach down and touch a stone.

Wild peace,

Glenn

Old art on much older stone.

The view from McMurdo.

“The land looks like a fairytale.” — Roald Amundsen (1872—1928) about Antarctica.

“Great God! this is an awful place.” — Robert Falcon Scott (1868—1912), also about Antarctica.

Antarctica. What does that have to do with primitivism?

Probably not much.  In fact, maybe just this: Antarctica told me that Mars sucks. Oh, and that Star Trek is a load of bull.

Yeah, honest. That’s what she said.

Now let me explain.

You see, when I’m not running around in the woods acting like a wanna-be neo-caveman, I have this tendency to feed my money addiction by doing seasonal work in Antarctica. Which provides for some interesting contrasts. I recently finished a stint down there, and after four months working in one of the coldest, most austere places on earth, it’s good to be: 1. not working for the man, and 2. back in warmer climes. A season in Antarctica can definitely re-invigorate one’s appreciation for places where plants grow and water flows.

What it comes down to for me is that it’s good to have an ecological context again. You see, while many of my friends who work in Antarctica join me in missing things like the smell of rain, or flowers, or dirt (or pretty much any smell other than diesel fuel, for that matter), the big thing I tend to notice as a practitioner of primitive skills is how completely powerless in relation to my own survival I become in a place like that.

Life in West Antarctica: shoveling snow.

Now, for most Americans this might not be so strange or disconcerting. After all, unless one knows a few old-school skills, one is pretty much dependent on industrial civilization for one’s survival anywhere. It doesn’t matter much in that regard if you’re in McMurdo Station, Antarctica, or Los Angeles, California. The food still comes pre-packaged, and the power to get it comes from cold hard cash.

But despite 15 years of studying primitive survival skills, I can’t even get a drink of water in Antarctica without gasoline and a whisperlite stove.  That kinda makes me nervous.

In most places I’ve traveled, I’m continually amazed at Mama Earth’s ability to provide for us humans, but I can say this about the southernmost continent: that place is not for us.

Without industrial technology and the diesel to fuel it, there really is nothing there for us human animals. And ironically since we do have diesel to burn, the main thing for us to do there is study the effects of global warming.  Go figure.

As I see it, that continent is proof that not everything in this universe was made “for man”. It might be appropriate that some places stay beyond our reach. And this realization has meaning for the values of our society. For instance, our culture tends to take for granted the idea that destiny will someday have us exploring other planets — opening them up to colonization and resource exploitation. Presidential candidates speak of sending Americans to Mars, and people cheer enthusiastically.

Tractors on an overland traverse.

After Antarctica, I just don’t buy it anymore. That place is the closest thing to other-worldly exploration a fella can get without actually going into outer space. And while it’s a profoundly awe-inspiring locale, when it comes to providing a place for humans to live, Antarctica simply sucks. So while I haven’t had the chance to ask the likes of Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin, I bet outer space and the moon suck too. Wouldn’t surprise me if Mars kinda follows the general trend (after all, I’ve seen the photos from the last rover).

It makes me wonder if all that pre-packaged food and lack of experiencing an ecological context has made us industrial humans so crazy that even after going to places like Antarctica, space, and the moon — even after sending a rover to Mars — many of us still think spaceships are our destiny. And that colonizing other planets might be a reasonable thing to do.

The simple fact is, we humans belong to this earth. This is where we grew into who we are. This is where our relations live. And this is where we belong. Other planets are bound to suck by comparison. The world’s indigenous cultures realize this. Really, pretty much any culture not totally mesmerised by the false promise of fossil fuels realizes this. It’s only industrial man that doesn’t quite get it.

Yep, that’s me. At a place called Siple Dome.

Many of us still think our destiny lies “over there.” Always beyond here and now. But Antarctica stands in simple contrast to that belief. Antarctica was the last great place on earth “conquered” by “great explorers.” But if we listen to her, she plainly states that “beyond” isn’t likely to deliver on our fantasies. She says, “I hate to break it to you guys, but Star Trek really is fiction.”

So this particular ex-trekkie turned neo-savage is going to keep exploring the land he was born on. Because North America beats the hell out of Antarctica. And probably Mars too.

Wild peace,

Glenn

“Traditional people of Indian nations have interpreted the two roads that face the light-skinned race as the road to technology and the road to spirituality. We feel that the road to technology…. has led modern society to a damaged and seared earth. Could it be that the road to technology represents a rush to destruction, and that the road to spirituality represents the slower path that the traditional native people have traveled and are now seeking again? The earth is not scorched on this trail. The grass is still growing there.”

Many years ago I was in need of some money, and a local farmer had a job for me. He had neglected some of his fields for over a decade, and so the land had been allowed to go a bit wild. The average modern industrial farm is first clear-cut, and then plowed every year to ensure that nothing wild returns to the land. But this particular farmer had not been farming, and so the fields had grown up with brush. Aspens and willows had come to re-inhabit large areas, and some of them were over ten feet tall. I was to be paid nine dollars an hour to repossess these fields for agriculture. The tool I was given for the task was a large tractor pulling an industrial-strength lawnmower known as a “brush-hog”. It was nine feet wide and had steel blades an inch thick. It could mow down and lay waste to any brush or trees small enough for the tractor to plow through, and the tractor was big enough to plow through plenty. It also had a sound-proofed, air-conditioned cab with a cassette player inside. I was grateful for this, since the work I was faced with would certainly be hot, dusty, and dull. However, neither the air conditioner nor the cassette player worked all that well.

I spent the next two weeks sitting 16 hours per day in a bumpy, stuffy, diesel smelling luke-warm box listening to scratchy rock and roll and the dull drone of the tractor’s engine. I did this while the world puttered by at a constant four miles an hour, and my mind wandered off searching for any and every fantasy I could conjure to cope with the boredom of my situation. In front of me was a “tangle” of brush and small trees. Behind me was a wasteland of shredded wood and desiccated plant matter. I turned the former into the latter at the steady, constant rate of about 30 acres per day. Each evening at 10pm I would stop, shut down the tractor, clear the accumulated plant-debris off the top of the brush-hog, and go home to catch some sleep. In the morning I would be back at dawn (6am) to grease the brush-hog, fire up the tractor, and start again. By the end of the ninth day, I was starting to feel more than just a little stir-crazy.

On the morning of the tenth day, I approached the brush-hog with my grease gun in the early dawn mist and realized I had forgotten to clear away the plant-debris the night before. Nearly a foot of grass, sticks, and “weeds” were tangled on top of that piece of equipment, and as I bent down to start clearing it off, I noticed something.

My attention was caught by a delicate spider’s web that had been built the night before on the brush-hog’s steel frame, and now glistened with morning dew. The spider who had built it was like none I had seen before. Her colors and markings were magnificent. I felt myself drawn in, and as I looked closer, I noticed more spiders — at first dozens, then hundreds, and finally thousands — of all shapes, colors, markings and sizes. At the same time, I noticed the insects they were feeding upon, and many thousand more tiny individual lives entered my awareness. There were little bright green jumping bugs and larger brown-green grasshoppers. There were tiny red spiders and large brown ones, long-legged ones, fat hairy ones, and skinny striped ones. There were bugs caught in webs and web-casting spiders wrapping them in silk. There were wolf spiders stalking and pouncing on prey. There was life and there was death. I became lost in it all — completely mesmerized as if in a dream. Time lost hold on me. The details & dramas of this tiny world absorbed my consciousness completely.

Finally I stepped back and surveyed the entire scene before me. I realized that on the surface of the little nine-foot by six-foot platform that was the top of the brush-hog, there currently survived a number of tiny souls in excess of thousands — and all of them going about their lives. These were but a small portion of the refugees of the 30 acres I had laid waste to the day before — these were just the ones who had happened to come to rest on top of the very same machine which had devastated their home. My mind & emotions reeled at the thought of how much life I had impacted while droning by each and every one of those previous nine days in a senseless stupor, stuck inside the cab of that droning machine.

I’d like to be able to write that my next move was to walk away from the brush-hog, the tractor and the job, never to return again. I’d like to write that I walked off that farm field and into the wilderness then and there, and that I’ve been living off cattails and venison ever since. But things are rarely so dramatic or simple. I still needed money and I didn’t know what else to do, so I took that experience and planted it deep inside my heart where I knew it could slowly begin to grow. Then I finished clearing off and greasing the brush-hog, got back inside the tractor and traded another day’s worth of life for little green papers.

Half a decade later, I was living with a group of new found friends in a primitive camp surrounded by National Forest and on the edge of Wilderness. We were learning, slowly but surely, the hard lessons involved in coming together to live by the old ways and rediscover what it means to be human. On this particular day however, a buddy and I had had enough of the hard lessons, and were speeding along in his jeep toward town to have breakfast at a local diner.

As we rounded a curve, we spotted a deer in the middle of the road lying in a spatter of her own blood. We stopped. The vehicle that had hit her must have left the scene just moments before. She was badly wounded, but still alive and struggling. Her hind legs had been shattered, and she was gasping for breath in the hot mid-morning sun. At first my buddy and I didn’t know what to do, but we soon realized we were being asked to help ease her passing. We pulled her to the side of the road, and my friend held her down while I slit her throat with my knife. As we did this my friend spoke softly to her words of comfort, and I apologized for the careless suffering my people were causing. Our eyes met, and I felt tears well up in mine. Then she bled out and died there in the ditch by the side of the road.

I whispered a prayer of thanks to her spirit for the gift of her flesh, then we placed her body in the back of the jeep and took her back to camp. She became the freshest, most delicious meat we had had in months. That night we celebrated, and had a feast in her honor. Nearly every one of us mentioned at some point how thankful we were for such good venison. I had carefully skinned her, and had placed her hide in a rack to be tanned. Later in the summer I would carefully transform her hide into soft buckskin, which would be used to make sleeves for a shirt. To this day, every time I wear that shirt the sleeves talk to me, reminding me of the gifts she gave me, not just in terms of meat and skin, but also in terms of life’s lessons.

I sometimes compare the clear voice of that buckskin shirt to the muffled sounds I hear from the shirts I get at the thrift store — the ones with labels that say vague things like “Made in Mexico” or “Made in Indonesia”. The ones assembled in factories half a world away, by people whose names I do not know, made out of cotton cut by machines being pulled by tractors over unknown farm fields. And I wonder if somewhere in those fields, webs are being spun by Spiders…

Wild peace,

Glenn

“Hmmm…interesting”, I thought.  (After all, what self-respecting primitivist wouldn’t enjoy a story about a guy living in a cave?)

It also said he had given up the use of money about 10 years prior, and hadn’t used a penny since.

“Wow. Seriously?”

Yep, it turns out Daniel had been inspired by the Sadhus of India and the teachings of Jesus (among other spiritual masters) to simply quit using money.  And more than that — he wanted to give up relating to the world by thinking in terms of credit and debt entirely.  No more “I’ll give, if I get…”, this man wanted to live by giving freely, and receiving freely.  Just like all the other animals on God’s green earth.

I thought: “One of these days, I’ve got to meet this guy!”

And as it turns out, this spring I finally got the chance.

I had just finished visiting an old buddy who was working as cougar tracker for a scientific study outside of Grand Junction Colorado, and the next item on my travel plans was to go to the Wintercount Primitive Skills Gathering in Maricopa, Arizona. But in the meantime I had a week with nothing planned. I looked at a map, and realized Moab was just over the border. I thought: “If I don’t do it now, when?”

So off I went. In search of a moneyless man.

I arrived in Moab, and got a bunk at the local backpacker hostel (Moab has a sweet hostel called the “Lazy Lizard“, with bunks for less than ten bucks. Really, it’s a bit of a dive, but…it has bunks for less than ten bucks!). Then I thought to myself: “Now what?”

I knew Daniel had a blog — after all, I’d been reading it off and on for two years. So I knew he used the internet, at least occasionally. What should I do? Email the guy? Try to set up a meeting at the library or something? It just seemed so…awkward.

There had to be a better way.

Then it hit me.  While it appeared that Mr. Suelo and I shared a few fundamental beliefs in common, one such philosophical point was a faith (though I’m sure his is far stronger than mine) in synchronicity — the belief that things happen for a reason.  And if things are meant to happen, they will happen.  Usually you just have to put an intention out there to the universe, and let go of being attached to the results.  Trust that whatever happens, it will be for the best.

So why not just follow my bliss, explore some canyons around Moab and see what comes?  Trust fate to set up a meeting, perhaps.  After all, the way Daniel lives had always been a bit of a fantasy in the back of my mind, so why not explore the country around Moab as if I were a wanna-be moneyless cave dwelling hermit (not really that big of a stretch for a primitivist) and see if I run into the real thing?  The worst that could happen would be I’d spend a week exploring canyons and caves around Moab.  No down side, really.

So once again, off I went.

It didn’t take long, actually.  On the second day of exploring a particularly promising canyon, I scaled passed a waterfall into a wide opening in the walls and heard the faint sound of a guitar off in the distance.  I followed the music, and found a cave.  I waited outside the cave for an end to the song, and then called out a friendly “hello”.  I was immediately greeted by a smiling Daniel.

And not just him, but another fellow (a Frenchman named Benjamin) who was traveling the world without money, plus two incredible (and quite stunning) Mexican women (Yazmin and Marissa) — one of whom (Marissa) was a documentary film maker getting material for a film about moneyless living.

Wow.

These folks turned out to be such wonderful people to run into while hiking.  And really, I don’t know what else to say. We shared some great food, music, and stimulating conversations around the campfire. I got to sleep in a cave for a few nights — what red-blooded primitivist-boy doesn’t dream of that?

And while I’m personally not sure how far I might go toward living without money myself, I think it’s definitely worth a long, hard mulling over.  After all, I’m a big fan of the gift economy used by indigenous people around the world.  But I guess mostly I just wrote this post to spread the word that people like Daniel and Benjamin exist.  To introduce a few more folks to their lives, and hopefully, tell a reasonably interesting story — the point of which is just that sometimes, if you follow your bliss and trust the universe, cool things can happen.

“Once I was in Victoria, and I saw a very large house. They told me it was a bank and that the white men place their money there to be taken care of, and that by and by they got it back with interest. We are Indians and we have no such bank; but when we have plenty of money or blankets, we give them away to other chiefs and people, and by and by they return them with interest, and our hearts feel good. Our way of giving is our bank.” – Chief Maquinna, Nootka

Wild peace,

Glenn

“The accusation that we’ve lost our soul resonates with a very modern concern about authenticity.” –Patricia Hewitt

Alright, since I’m traveling down in the southwest at the moment…Colorado to be exact, I’d like to share with you one of my favorite old cowboy sayings. And ironically, it fits real well with most cowboy culture here in colorful Colorado.

The saying goes: “That cowboy is all hat and no cattle.”

I think most of us “get it.” There is a wide gulf between the authenticity of an old-school rancher who rides horses and actually herds cattle (and to one I met recently — here’s to you Ray) compared to the authenticity of some banker in Denver who dons a brand new black hat, denim shirt and big belt buckle in order to go dancing at the honky-tonk clubs on a Friday night. Now, I’m not knocking the hat-wearing banker (at least not too much). Banking is boring, while dancing is fun. And country music is plenty good music to dance to. Besides, cowboy hats are cool, and I’ve been known to role-play a fantasy or two from time to time. (I played Dungeons and Dragons in high-school…what were you thinking I meant?). Still, I figure most of us, if we were to be honest, would have to admit the hat-wearer who actually herds cattle would win the authenticity contest. And so the saying goes.

But let’s stop and think for a minute…why is authenticity often so hard to come by in our “modern” world?

Hmmm…well, imagine going out into the wild (let’s say, maybe somewhere in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) and finding a wolf. A wolf in a pack. A wolf that chases caribou for a living. This wolf literally hunts the open tundra with her kin, runs the caribou, pulls them down with her teeth, and brings fresh warm flesh home to feed her pups.

Any problems with authenticity there?

Now imagine taking some nice bloody angus beef steaks up to that wolf’s lair, and laying a trail of them all the way down to the inside of a zoo in Anchorage. Now that the she-wolf is caged, imagine training her to howl a musical scale and jump and run around in circles — in other words, to sing and dance. And if the wolf sings and dances, you feed the wolf some dog food. If she dances real good, maybe another steak. You think to yourself: “the tourists will love it!” And they probably will.

But now, come up with some songs and dances for that wolf to do that would be “authentic”.

Don’t you reckon that might be hard? I mean, since the nature of an arctic wolf is not to sing and dance for dog food payments, but to run with her pack and bloody-well take down caribou?

No matter how much work you put into those songs and dances — no matter how gritty or hard-core you might make them, or how “wolfish” they might be, no matter how melancholy, deep, or sophisticated they get, those songs and dances done for dog food will never be authentic. At least not compared to the life that wolf once had (harder in many ways though it may have been).

I think we “modern” and “civilized” humans are in a fairly analogous situation. And while some readers might think I’m stretching a bad analogy to make a dubious point, other folks will know right away — deep down in their gut and the marrow of their bones — what I mean.

Life may be easier in many ways, yes. But authentic?

There was a time when all humans on this earth hunted and gathered or gardened or herded or farmed for their food. They built their own shelter, made their own clothing, started their own fire, chopped their own wood, and carried their own water. They fed, clothed and sheltered themselves, their children, and their elders. They were generous with their kin. They worked things out with their neighbors. Or sometimes, they made war. But if something needed to be done, they were the ones who did it. They participated fully in the task of all life — to be challenged, to survive, and to thrive.

Now, if we’re to be honest, I think most of us in our “modern” society, would have to admit that our daily lives are fairly trivial by comparison.

Less than 2% of Americans are farmers — i.e. are engaged in the process of feeding the rest of us. So then, what do the rest of us do to justify being fed?

And even among the select few who farm these days the old-school, self-sufficient Jeffersonian farmer is at best a rare oddity. The “modern” farmer in America is an employee of multinational corporations — a wage-slave for agri-business. And if we stop and consider it, most of us would probably give the authenticity prize to the odd old-schooler over the modern corporate farmer. Why? Imagine a wolf who, instead of hunting wild caribou on the open tundra, now manages an industrial reindeer feed lot for a wolf-boss. A dirty job, for sure, but “authentic”?

My buddy David, drying salmon.

So the other 98% of us are mostly trying to figure out what song and dance we can do to get the folks who own the food supply (and every other supply) to give us a share. And in the process, we feel kinda lame about it. Or at least, I do.

Occasionally someone comes along and sings and dances about the emptiness of all this singing and dancing. And we think “Yeah…now that’s authentic.” But that gets old pretty quick too.

People will try pretty much anything to make a buck these days. And don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying that’s wrong — it just is what it is. They’ve been made dependent on the system. What else are they going to do?

But for my part, I feel authenticity gets lost in the process. We’re just not the humans we once were. And to me, life feels a little less real for that.

How about you?

What does your bone marrow say?

Wild peace,

Glenn

“But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?”

On a recent overnight flight between Los Angeles and Aukland, I beat back boredom by watching an in-flight Australian reality T.V. show on, of all things, the subject of happiness. The show took a group of eight chronically unhappy middle-class people from Sydney (seriously!) and put them together with a team of “happiness therapists”. At the beginning of the program, they took a psychological test in which each of them rated well below the national average “happiness score” for the typical Australian.

Then the team of therapists went to work, and at the end of the program these folks were tested again. All of them tested happier. What I thought was most interesting (from a primitivist perspective) were the interventions used.

First off, each of them were helped to face and contemplate death — reflecting on it in order to put their lives in proper perspective.

Then the therapists worked with each of them in five basic areas:

Mindfulness.

Gratitude.

Service.

Exercise.

Diet.

Interestingly enough, the issue of “getting out into nature” never came up. I’m sure it might have helped if it had (a walk in the woods usually brightens my day), but I’m ok with the fact that it didn’t. Because, it still struck me that even with the issue of connecting to nature removed from the equation, each of the things the therapists worked on with these folks still took them back to the “primal matrix” — i.e. back to a greater experience of things which would have been daily fare for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

I mean, think about it. All of the issues mentioned above would have been attended to naturally in the lives our primitive ancestors — their context would have nudged them toward happiness. But for these relatively affluent urban first-world people, it was pretty darn easy to slip through the happiness cracks in their situation.

Not buying it? Well, let’s flesh each one out a little.

First off, death. Most modern folks have little encounter with death, and so little reason to contemplate it, or it’s ramifications for their lives. Death is hidden away.

Second, mindfulness. Most modern folks have lives where mindfulness is rarely necessary, while rushing to get things done is encouraged, and a certain amount of obliviousness is often an asset. And besides that, we’re presented with a near endless array of distractions to occupy our time and attention: TV, movies, music from the I-pod, computer games, books (my favorite), sports, alcohol, drugs, coffee, sugar (ok, really my favorite), facebook (guilty pleasure), workaholism, whatever.

Third, service. While some form of indentured servitude (i.e. forced labor) is the norm in modern society, service is actually relatively rare. It’s something we volunteer for on the weekends, if we want to. And of course, still have energy left over for after the work week.

Exercise and diet? Exercise is usually an optional jog or gym-visit after work (if we can muster the discipline), and diet is usually processed grain + sugar + “whatever we want”, healthy or not.

And lastly, gratitude. Well, I’ll talk about that a little later.

When it comes to confronting death, our primitive ancestors had no problem. These people were hunters, after all — death was a part of daily life.  Animals were killed and butchered on a regular basis.  And when it came to experiencing risk with their own lives, they did this as well — thought nearly always in reasonable amounts.  Risk people could and did rise to and successfully navigate — which tends to give one a sense of power in relation to one’s life as well (always a good feeling for beating back depression).

Mindfulness. Primitive living requires it, and provides both the silence and leisure that encourages it. For instance, spiritual retreat centers built for the purpose of fostering mindfulness nearly always provide a quiet, natural environment, and a light workload in which to pursue that quest. Hunter gatherers were in an analogous situation — living outdoors and working an average of 6 hours a day or less, usually at a leisurely pace.

On top of that, wild nature creates both the dynamic sense experience that encourage attentiveness, and the tinge of danger that makes such attention advisable. In the woods, we tend to shut up and pay attention because: 1. we might meet a hungry bear (or even just a hungry mosquito), and 2. something unexpected (and pretty darn cool) could happen at any moment. Of course, this doesn’t keep the average person from entering the woods in a clueless state these days — old habits die hard. But it does reveal how a life immersed in nature tends to discourage such habits over time.

Service. Primitive life works because people serve each other. Living in an extended family encourages service to one’s kin, and those kin usually have little problem reminding an individual if he or she neglects familial responsibilities. However in the first world, one’s life is usually consumed with service to impersonal institutions, and so one often has to go outside normal life to “volunteer” to serve people in a way that actually feels meaningful on a personal level (moms being a notable exception, of course).

Exercise. Primitive life demands it. And it’s the good stuff — low impact, unlikely to cause repetitive stress injuries — stuff like walking or running on soft ground, swimming, carrying moderate weight objects, etc. Healthy exercise becomes just a natural part of daily life.

Diet. Primitive diet is by necessity wild, organic, whole-food, high in fiber, high in nutrients, high in protein, high in healthy fats, low in sugar, etc. And you have to exercise to get it! One would be hard pressed to find a healthier diet anywhere.

And gratitude? Well, it seems like a sense of privilege and entitlement (and therefore a sense of victimization) often goes hand in hand with life in first world countries. I’m not sure why, but perhaps it has to do with thinking that we’re above the rest of nature. “Better” than “just animals”. Or maybe it has to do with the level of comfort we’ve come to expect — i.e. creatures who can’t even crap without a sit-down toilet under them and four walls around them may just wind up demanding too much, and so are easily disappointed.

What I do know, is that every traditional indigenous person I’ve ever encountered who has described their spirituality to me has emphasized gratitude. From the first moment of awakening in the morning. And gratitude for everything — even the “bad” stuff we don’t like. Gratitude seems to somehow exist at the very core of traditional native life.

But let me be clear, I’m not saying our primitive ancestors, or primitive people today, were/are always happy — far from it. These were, and are, people — ultimately not so different from you or I. I’m definitely not saying they live(d) in some kind of continually smiling utopia. There always has been, and always will be, good reasons for people to get pissed off or sad.

I’m also not saying that modern people can’t be happy. I know quite a few modern people who are plenty happy. All I’m saying is that if you look at the kinds of experiences and ways of being that tend to foster happiness, it becomes clear that our primitive ancestors had the deck stacked in their favor.

It seems that, ironically, some kinds of luxury actually make us less satisfied with life. And some kinds of “hardship” can actually make for happier folks.

And so, we might want to really think about that. Maybe our lives could be happier if they included a little more primal experience? Heck, maybe they could even be happier if they included a lot more primal experience?

What do you think?

Wild peace,

Glenn

“By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.” — Robert Frost

“Work sucks.”

For most of us, this cliche rings true. And in my experience, the exceptions tend to prove the rule. A tiny minority seem to get joy and fulfillment from their jobs, but such folks usually have jobs where most, if not all of society’s “dirty work” is left to others.  Like the primitivist writer Bob Black, I tend to define work as “forced labor”, so that makes perfect sense — after all, it’s the labor we don’t want to do ourselves that we’re tempted to force on others.

Even when folks love their jobs at first, the repetitive nature of institutionalized work tends to wear thin over time. Very few jobs keep people within the narrow zone between boredom and burnout over the long haul.

Believe it or not, the cliche that “work sucks” is even found in the oldest verses of the Bible. And interestingly enough, it’s tied to agriculture and listed as the main consequence of original sin. Just take a close look at Genesis 3:17-19 sometime.  Modern anthropologists have shed some light on what the Genesis story is talking about, by confirming that the experience of “working for the man” developed within agricultural societies over the last few thousand years.

So what to do about it?

Since the beginning of work, people have tried to escape from work.

The solution for those with power has historically been to make others work for them. In fact, anthropologists also tell us that the process of enslaving others is universal in “civilized” societies (i.e. societies that have both farms and cities).  This has been true of every urban/farming culture from Greece and Rome through India and China to the Aztecs and the Maya. And in the process of creating our own modern world, slavery got to the point where Euro-American economies from the 16th through the 19th century were completely dependent on it for their very survival.

But of course, such extreme levels of slavery have been outlawed now that the industrial economy has developed into it’s more modern form.

Recently, an advocate of industrial technology shed some light on why that happened, when he made the argument that our first-world petroleum-based technological lifestyle gives each of us the equivalent of “400 virtual slaves working for us 24/7″. Immediately after, he asked the rhetorical question “who would want to give that up?”

Who indeed?

So there is our escape from the curse of forced labor. Now we don’t enslave our fellow humans, we can build “slaves” in the form of machines which get their energy from petroleum. Seems like a wonderful solution to the problem of work…everybody wins, right?

Well, maybe not everybody.

Strangely enough, slavery is still alive and well.

And indigenous people are being consumed in various ways to bring us those virtual slaves…never mind the wars in the middle east, terrorism, dictatorships, etc., that are all intimately linked with global oil extraction.

And from the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico to development of Canadian tar sands, the land we depend on and call home is being polluted in ways never seen before.

And if all that weren’t bad enough, it turns out oil is a finite, non-renewable resource that is actually running out pretty darn quick.  So ultimately, it’s going to leave us high and dry.

Beyond all that, the most incredible thing (in my mind, at least) is that, in spite of the virtual toil of those 400 petroleum “slaves”, most of us still work a whole hell of a lot.

Think about it.  Has the industrial world freed you from working?  Does it feel like you have 400+ slaves at your beck and call 24/7?

In fact, most of us work a good bit more than our pre-historical “primitive” ancestors!

See: “The Original Affluent Society” by the noted Anthropologist Marshal Sahlins.

So it really does appear that we are caught in a rat-race — stuck as much as if we were hamsters on a wheel. What can we do? How can we escape the curse of work?

Marshall Sahlins writes that there are two roads to affluence: produce much, or desire little. The flip side of the “produce much” road implies a certain amount of “desiring much”. We see this in our society, where the whole economy is centered around producing much and an entire industry (the advertising industry) has grown up around helping us desire much.  We see this expressed in the words of the fictional character Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street: “Greed” he tells us, “is good.”

The flip side of desiring little, however, is that one then finds sharing to be easy. This is the aboriginal way to affluence: desire little, share much. Anthropologists and other visitors to reasonably intact nomadic hunter-gatherer societies have found this way to be nearly universal among such ancient cultures. They have also found slavery to be generally absent as well. For myself, I observed this way of being as still common among the Walpiri Aboriginal people of central Australia during a visit to the outback a few years ago.

Some have called this way the “gift economy”.

And surprisingly, though few American Christians might realize it, this way appears central to Jesus’ cure for that nasty “fall” noted in the book of Genesis.  Jesus is quoted as saying: “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” And “The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same.”

After all, there is a saying: “The worst day fishing is still better than the best day working.”

Maybe, just maybe, we could “abolish work”?

A few folks I know of have already escaped the job trap.

What have we got to lose but our slaves?

Wild peace,

Glenn

I sure hope that’s true.  Especially the “fire making up for going bald” part.

Anyway, as I mentioned in a previous post, I once participated in a year-long primitive skills immersion in the Northwoods of Wisconsin with some mighty-fine folks.  However, when we went into the forest to make camp, we kinda over-did the building of our first hearth.

We set out to collect large rocks for a fire ring, and carried them quite a ways to get them to our site. Then we dug a big hole for the fire, and lined it with the rocks.  One of the guys offered a few words of prayer as we lit our first blaze.

I have to admit, it was quite an event, and the results were downright pretty…maybe like what you’d see in a national park campground.  We were proud of ourselves – a fine beginning to our year in the woods.

Then that evening an elder came out and joined us by the fire.  It wasn’t long before he asked “So, why did you make the fire like that?”

Good question.  None of us really had an answer, other than that’s how we’d all seen them done.  I think maybe Smokey the Bear got an honorable mention.

Then we discussed the pro’s and con’s of how we’d done it.

Pro: “Only you can prevent forest fires.”  Ok, fair enough.

Con: The fire can’t get much air down in that hole, so it’s pretty darn smokey, not to mention harder to start and not as hot as it could be.

Pro: It looks pretty.

Con: The hole and the rocks shielded folks from most of the heat of the fire, so it was even less good for warmth.

Pro: It’s how we’ve always done it.

Btw, that's not me...that's a friend from the Teaching Drum Outdoor School.

Con: Next rain, the hole will fill up with water (which it did, the very next day in fact).

Pro: Hmmm…that’s all we could think of, actually.

Con: We lugged a bunch of rocks, and dug a hole, which involved a fair bit of effort.

Con: Our fire ring would take just as much effort to remove, otherwise it would always be there as a sign of our presence…not exactly “Leave No Trace”.

“Ok then” someone asked “how would you have done it?”  The old man brushed some of the duff aside with his hand, clearing a spot for a fire in all of about three seconds.

“Done” he said.

It never ceases to amaze me how good we “modern” humans are at complicating things.

And these days I tend to look at campground hearths with a very different eye.  Especially the big steel fire-rings you see in the well established ones.  I know they’re built for safety…an attempt by the powers-that-be to protect the forest from the dumbest among us.  That’s probably a good thing, I guess.  But it’s no wonder a lot of folks these days don’t enjoy camping as much as they could.

Fast-forward ten years and I now live in a small cabin next to a creek, in the woods just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska.  It’s a good cabin, and it provides all the shelter I might need from both summer rains and winter snows.  But it’s not very big.  And not really set up for more than a couple of modern people to feel comfortable in it at one time. Though to be fair, a whole family of pre-contact Athabascans would have found it more than adequate to their needs. But these days folks have furniture, and are not so easily content.

At any rate, the cabin doesn’t work very well to have guests over.  And like most people, I like having guests over.  So what’s a guy to do?  Build a house with a spare living room?  Nah.  Don’t be silly.  Much easier to just built a campfire in my front yard.  I mean, everyone likes hanging out around a campfire, don’t they?

It was simple, though I put a bit more effort into it than that elder from ten years ago. I took a little sand from the creek that flows past my cabin and made a fire-proof pad so the duff wouldn’t catch fire.  (Up here in Alaska’s boreal forest there is usually a flammable layer of organic matter underfoot, so it’s best to be careful.)  The nice thing about the pad though, is the fire is up where it can get air, and everyone can feel the heat.

More friends from the Teaching Drum warming themselves over one of their hearths.

Then I arranged a number of large pieces of firewood in a circle around the hearth for folks to sit on, stump style. All set.  Just add wood, flame, and people (and maybe food and a little beer), which I did the next evening.  It felt good to invite friends over to a warm campfire under an open sky.  And as the sun set through the trees, the stars came out.

The same thing is often achieved (sort of) by my fellow Americans when they buy a gas grill and a patio set.  But I’ve got to admit, I prefer the primal feel of something a bit more rustic.  Plus it’s more of a novelty for my buddies, who can get the patio grill experience pretty much anywhere these days.

And to boot, I saved some serious cash by doing it old-school.  In these tough economic times, going a bit more primitive can have it’s advantages.  Some folks might call me a “hick” or a “red-neck” for inviting them over to sit on stumps by an open fire…but I can live with that.  I think there’s a deeper magic to an outdoor hearth that not everyone can see.

Wild peace,

Glenn