Pain?

[BlueHeron]

Happy Earth Day, everyone.

(You know how they say, “every day is Mother’s/Father’s Day”? Same goes for Earth Day…)

Now that I’ve finished preaching to the choir…

Does anyone/has anyone here experienced emotional and physical pain as they rewild? I experience very intense pain, and I don’t know why, and it bothers me. Sometimes I get the feeling that I shouldn’t be in pain over rewilding. I think I am hitting my head against a brick wall (metaphorically speaking). I sometimes tell myself that the pain is part of a healing and learning process. Maybe it’s not. After all, in the past it hasn’t been painful for me to learn how to read, or tie my shoe, or play tennis, or fish, or start a fire. When scrapes and cuts and other physical damages start to heal, the pain diminishes. All other kinds of healing/learning: no pain. Why wouldn’t it hold true for rewilding?

What am I missing here?

When I was 10, my babysitter told me (quite innocently) that before modern medicine, people used salt to clean wounds and kill germs. She was half right. She was missing some information: they washed the salt OUT. For the past 16 years I have had a scar from a salt burn. I kept putting the salt in the wound because I told myself that the pain must be part of the healing. The wound didn’t actually start to heal until I stopped salting it. I didn’t like the salt, but I trusted her; she seemed so sure of the information she gave me. I highly doubt she had ever cleaned a wound with salt herself, or she would have told me about washing it out.

I feel like I’m missing information. Right now, this is the best explanation I can come up with for why I am in pain:

Maybe it results from being more aware of what is really happening in our world? Being aware of how my day-to-day interactions in the city affect me and control my behavior? (I have to respond to people, after all.) Being aware of how day-to-day agriculture, logging, oil, manufacturing etc industries affect the world? Being aware of the way that our social constructs shatter the self? Trying desperately to detect, decipher and resist all those sneaky, subtle civilized messages while sitting in the middle of them? Wanting to get OUT but knowing there’s a long road ahead, debts to pay off, a “tribe” to find and commit to… it all gives me headache, heartache, boneache, skinache, nerveache, brainache, etc etc. And then when I pay attention to how much pain I’m carrying, I want it to all go away, I want to disappear. :’( Is civ putting salt in the wounds that I’m trying to air? If I mentally leave civ, how can I keep a job?

[Matt]

Yeah, I sometimes feel that pain too. I think it comes partly from recognizing the horrors of civilization, tapping into all the grief that we have been suppressing for so long about all the things that are happening in the world. THere’s been a lot of eco-psychological studies done on this kind of eco-grief, and I 've noticed myself, that when we acknowledge it and move through it, we cant ruly see how conencted we are to everything - that’s what’s causing the grief in the first place. However, as we rewild, and tap into the grief, we also get trapped in the situation you talked about, where we know that there are better things out there but are trapped in lives that no longer appeal to us. We are trapped knowing the grief and connection , but not being able to do anything, so we feel even more grief and pain.

For me at least, rewilding isn’t just another kind of learning that adds on to what you know, like getting the ability to play tennis. It also re-shapes everything you know, creating a dissonance between what you see around you and what you know.

I think in the end, rewilding needs concrete action, and the pain will only go away once you are away from that dissonance, truly not harming the world. But it is so hard to do that, I know, I struggle with it myself, I don’t know.

[timeLESS]

it could perhaps be that the pain was already there with you all the time, you were learned to ignore the pain. Rewilding strengthens your awareness, the more you become aware the more you start to actually see and experience all the damage that has been done?

I think rewilding tells me amongst other things to stop and take a look at what is hurting me. thus i become more aware of the pain im carrying.

Take care with that!

[incendiary_dan]

I’ve noticed that extended time in cities tires me, makes me depressed, and generally just makes me feel crappy. Where do you live? I’m a student, so I commute into the city a few days a week for class, as well as meeting weekly with some co-religionists. I always feel better when I get home to the woods, and days spent out in the woods are always better. If you live in the city, then my guess is that you’re getting far too much exposure to the steaming pile of crap that is civilization.

It also re-shapes everything you know, creating a dissonance between what you see around you and what you know.

Dissonance? I think rewilding gets rid of that dissonance between the imaginary civilized world view and reality. Perhaps just making oneself aware of this previous dissonance is pretty jarring, though, especially when you consider what’s being done because of it.

[BlueHeron]

Thanks to all of you.

I think I have a better handle on the problem now, after reading your responses.

In the city of Seattle (in many neighborhoods, including the one where I rent), one finds oneself awash in messages that effectively say, “If you consume this, you’ll get the best of the best AND save the world at the same time.” It’s the newest, shiniest civilized religion. Or maybe it’s more like a social pact: “we use buzzwords, you hand us your money.”

For example: “We bake our cupcakes in small batches on location using gourmet recipes. Indeed, we have made cupcakes into a fine art. You cannot buy a better cupcake - not only do they taste like heaven on a biscuit, but we use vegan, organic, and fair trade ingredients to make them, AND when you buy from us, you support a local business (I mean, geez, you just moved here [to work for Microsoft], show a little pride in the neighborhood, people). You deserve these cupcakes. If everyone ate them, everyone would get what they deserve, and also, all the world’s problems would be solved! Plus, the people who serve you the cupcakes dress very fashionably, and this will make you feel like you belong to something special for choosing our cupcakes. (You might even pick up some ideas for what clothing to buy next!) And you CERTAINLY don’t have to change any part of your lifestyle to contribute to the health of your community and the planet. Nope, you just have to BUY OUR CUPCAKES! ;D” (my interpretation of the marketing at this particular shop)

OK, I have eaten one or two of these cupcakes. Delicious. I don’t regret sampling them. But it takes a lot of WORK not to get caught up in the EXTREMELY convincing marketing bullshit, and resist becoming a vegan, organic “lamb for the slaughter”. And you’ll see this kind of bullshit EVERYWHERE in Seattle. Imagine yourself as one of the typical yuppies in the neighborhood where I live: finishing school, landing a well-paying job, buying a house in a vegan, organic neighborhood, moving there, not really knowing anyone or feeling like you have roots in this place, and finding yourself bombarded with messages like the one at the cupcake shop. You’d have to have a very exceptional kind of personality not to feel “I can belong to something greater if I participate in this vegan, organic, socially conscious consumerist lifestyle.”

(By the way, if I hadn’t read Ishmael, I might have ended up in the same boat. I’ll truthfully admit that I entered into that “caste” of society on the day of my birth. According to civilized myths, I am “supposed” to land a well-paying job after finishing my education and proceed to buy vegan cupcakes. Perhaps if I hadn’t grown up with so much invisible privilege, I would have a little more practice resisting those messages.)

All of these messages comprise a value system that the people in my neighborhood share, which sounds and looks perfectly innocent and progressive until you realize that at its root it always involves buying something – the “right” thing. Meanwhile, when I pass people on the sidewalk or greet them at the coffee shop they often look a little lost… like after following all those instructions for how to live, they’re not sure where to go next… like they feel, “gee, it’s lonely at the top…” They say people have a good quality of life in Seattle, but mainly I think what they really mean to say is that people have lots of money.

Realizing that so many people around me are trying so hard to feel happy and connected, yet missing the mark because they are deluded, pains me. I feel that I can’t express these sentiments to the people around me unless I want to be labeled misanthropic or heretic; keeping these feelings inside also creates pain. Realizing that there’s very little I can personally do to stop the machine from eating the world further compounds the pain.

I struggle with this push-and-pull, this rock and a hard place, every day. I’d say a large part of the problem I personally face involves my surroundings. And it seems clear now that I can solve it by moving out of that neighborhood, and maybe out of Seattle altogether, and start to tip the scales towards more direct experience with rewilding (instead of this hamster wheel of resisting the hidden messages in everything presently surrounding me).

Thanks again! I really do appreciate the time you all took to read about my feelings and form responses! I feel lucky to have found such people on the internet of all places.

[incendiary_dan]

They say people have a good quality of life in Seattle, but mainly I think what they really mean to say is that people have lots of money.

On a related note, one of the big factors that groups like the UN use to evaluate “quality of life” in a country or area is how many Western consumer goods the average person has. Oi.

[Matt]

timeless, what you say makes a lot of sense, thanks.

incendiary_dan, I guess it just makes you aware of the dissonance in some ways, but in others, not so much. I mean if I just go about my daily business and don’t know that every action I take and my entire world view is propagated by destruction, than no dissonance exists. If I do know and then I have to go on doing it, then there is dissonance.

blue heron, thank you for your thank you, thanks for brining this topic up. I totally agree with the whole green washing thing. Greener is better, no doubt, but green is never going to be enough. I wish I could make that same decision as you just to move out, I wish I was there, but I’m not yet.