Relentless pursuit

As my last blog post for this course, I would like to recap the practices, discoveries, and effects of re-wilding.

Practices

• Tracing the invisible, undeniable threads of interwoven embeddedness in lived material relations of my environment through biospheric interoception and biofeedback.
• Unlocking fear and anger, terror and rage, as embodied responsiveness to violation of integrity of the enlargened self to empower feral and instinctive protectiveness. 
• Externalizing discomfort into experimental actions seeking systemic balance, including the possibility of personal diminishment.

Discoveries

• Our conception of "nature" removes the human from the equation and distorts our authentic immersion in the world.
• The profound dissociation between our actions and their impacts may be one of the many consequences of industrialization and globalization
• Pleasurable experiences in nature seem to sacralize abstracted, romanticized relationships with our surrounds and may conflate recreational escape with benevolence.

Effects

• Along with many other incendiary prompts in my environment, the practice of re-wilding has imbued me with a mounting urgency for social change, reaching a pitch that is almost uncomfortable to bear at times.
• Re-wilding seems to expose my complicity in the suffering of others which evokes feelings of guilt and shame that seem appropriate, although they are inadequate to enact material changes.
• I now feel a strong desire to continue to learn about my daily exchanges and to overcome the prescribed ignorance of my active relations within the world.

As I summarize these points, I feel immensely grateful to have grown through these practices, discoveries, and effects, which I feel will have a lasting impact on my life.  My fundamental understanding of the world has been altered.  Thank you to anyone who has followed this blog and witnessed the unfolding of this journey.

May we all be relentless in our pursuit of the dignity of our biospheric self.

Gloria

Livelihood

This week I have been battling questions about work, career, and finding my place in the mess of civilization, and I have started to suspect that the re-wilding practice I have undertaken for this class is one of the most disrupting influences in navigating my way.  Compromise seems like defeat, tolerance seems like a mask for manipulation, and work looks like theft.  As I have repeatedly said in class and in my last post on this blog, I am suspicious of mind-body practices designed to increase feelings of calm and well-being since our society seems to be suffering from a debilitating complacency that could be exacerbated by meditative practices.  Accommodation of discomfort affords the continuation of abusive systems of power.

In Nature Is Ordinary Too, Giblett (2012) reviews the work of Raymond Williams on the false binary of nature and culture, which he reintegrates by way of the idea of livelihood.  Livelihood, according to Williams, is both nature and culture, because it describes the way in which humans and nature are interwoven into each other.  Giblett says that nature is "ordinary, the stuff of work and everyday life," which has been the major discovery of my re-wilding practice on this blog.  Although I have spent several periods of my life living somewhat sustainably on the land, I am no longer content with personal salvation.  

My re-wilding practices have led me to question: How can we re-invent livelihood in our culture in a way that is life-giving?  If we sacrificed dignity and integrity for illusory security and indulgent comforts, what kinds of labor and value can we now wisely offer world? 

References:

Giblett, R. (2012). Nature is ordinary too. Cultural Studies, 26(6), 922-933. doi:10.1080/09502386.2012.707221