I'm a fraud

Earlier this week, while walking to class one day, I saw a black and white cat sleeping between two trees in a patch of woods on UWG campus.  Looking at its body curled up among leaves and dry bushes and imagining how its weight and its fur make a personalized impression in that wind-protected nest, I was moved by its intimate and visceral belonging in the world.  I have also become much more attentive to birds near my home and on campus, imagining what it would be like to know myself as strong enough to weather freezing nights, to rest in brown, crinkly places, to forage throughout the day.  They make it look so easy.  It has given me a feeling of courage and some kind of strange joy to imagine that there might be safety in a life so variable and unpredictable.

This quote in the Endredy book seems to speak to this:
"The lover of Nature is the one whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of adulthood.  Such a person's intercourse with heaven and Earth becomes part of her daily food.  In the presence of Nature a wild delight runs through the person, in spite of real sorrows.  Nature says - this is my creature, with all his impertinent gifts, he shall be glad with me."  ~Ralph Waldo  Emerson

For this week's practice, I selected the following exercises from Earthwalks:
1. Barefoot Walk: "The soles of our feet are wonderful sensory organs that we tend to keep wrapped and hidden away - but when they are free to experience the air and earth, the sun and water, they can provide us with a great deal of information that can lead to discovery" (p.33).
2. Count Three: "With each step, as you look at the ground directly in front of you, count three things you see" (p.38).  In describing the practice, he quotes Lew Welch, "Step out onto the Planet.  Draw a circle a hundred feet round.  Inside the circle are 300 things nobody understands, and, maybe nobody's ever seen.  How many can you find?"

Unfortunately, my re-wilding practice was predominantly a frustrating experience this week.  I did, however, enjoy the sensory pleasure of feeling my feet on the cold, wet soil and the silent, observant steps that almost seemed dance-like.  I was attentive to my knee alignment and felt almost like I was performing the deep lunges in t'ai chi-style walking, except I placed the ball of my foot before the heel.  I also saw about ten enormous vultures on my drive into the park standing around (what I think was) a dead armadillo.  I often found myself thinking of taking pictures on my walks to put on this blog, but then would stop myself and ask how the "capture" of a visual experience can serve to objectify and commodify the event.

As I walked, I was often distracted by thoughts from my day and struggled to maintain focus on the activity, as if some unpleasant realization was gnawing at me.  When I finally attended to this feeling, I saw the cognitive dissonance in using fossil fuels to drive almost forty minutes to indulge this sensory pleasure where I fantasize about belonging to the earth.  The very fact that I have to try to belong on this planet seemed to be the ultimate attestation of my alienation.  I was the Other in this place.  I felt like a fraud, like there was no way to be a part of a place that I so wholeheartedly reject in all of my actions, buying food in plastic containers at supermarkets and cruising nonchalantly over paved roads every day.  As if it wasn't enough that my species has taken over so much of the world - we even have to be a nuisance in the few wild places that are left. 

I recently read a piece in "The Coming Insurrection" by The Invisible Committee that speaks to this conundrum:
"The environment is what's left to man after he's lost everything. ... What is frozen in an environment is a relationship with the world based on management, that is, on foreignness.  A relationship with the world where we're not made as well as the rustling of trees, the smell of frying oil in the building, the bubbling of water, the uproar of school classrooms, the mugginess of summer evenings, a relationship with the world where there is me and then there is my environment, surrounding me but never really constituting me."

My disappointment in my experience seemed mirrored by my discovery about the author of the book, James Endredy.  In his introduction, Endredy describes that he is a first generation Hungarian-American who spent much of his youth on wilderness adventures.  He is a photographer by trade and, in search of answers to spiritual questions, studied with Victor Sanchez, a "modern-day Toltec," who was conducting workshops on the "Art of Living Purposefully."  Sanchez wrote the preface to this book, Earthwalks, in which he praises Endredy for making these Walks available to the world through his books as needed "medicine."

I became curious about the potential for cultural appropriation of this work and visited the site, http://www.newagefraud.org/ which has excellent information on plastic shamans and exploitation of Native practices.  Endredy is not listed on their forum, but Victor Sanchez is named as a fraud, as is Castaneda, whom Sanchez mentioned in his preface.  Though Endredy often describes the Earthwalk practices as being derived from his own nature immersion experiences, he does refer to his Toltec teachings as one of the inspirations for his work.

I really like this video with Charlene Sul of the Ohlone people who shares her insight into "ways that non-Native people can get involved in indigenous ways." 

With the troubled history of this land and the prevalent disrespectful use of Native ways, I feel ambivalent about whether I can continue to follow Endredy's exercises with integrity.  I would still like to take a peek at the Ecoshamanism book, but I now also fear that Endredy's exercises may be promoting a misguided and distorted fantasy about nature that is unrealizable.

I have long suspected that, until I am utterly dependent on a particular landbase for my shelter, food, and livelihood, I will always be a tourist in wild places, like an anthropologist who gets a thrill from traveling to foreign lands to live with the "natives."  The more I chase down my belonging on this planet, the more it will elude me.  I feel disillusioned with the project of this blog, but I don't see this as an end, but an opportunity to go further.  I am hoping to discover a practice that somehow integrates the principles of rewilding in a way that is honest about my current role on the biosphere.  What will help me move toward embodied membership in the world, not as a recreational escape, but as an authentically lived experience?