Rewilding In Action

Visions of the Rewilding Renaissance Rewilding Mind & Heart
#61

I am new here, so forgive my niavete.

If asked to leave tomorrow, I don’t think I could resist.

While the threat of death is very real, death is inevitable. Really living is not inevitable.

“all men die, not all men really live”

While I know this is the romantic notion that so many of you abhore, it my heart I know there can be no other way.(for me)

I doubt I would last long. I have few “skills.” I have a body, though strong by civilized standards, that has been coddled by civilized life.
This is not to say I would expire, though I can accept the possibility. Most likely mother nature would quickly give me a harsh lesson, but that is not to say I would be defeated. Quite the opposite. Lessons, especialy those hard earned hold great value to me. I would most likely return to civ, brused, but with specific knowledge of what I need to learn for my next attempt.

So many of you considered McCandles a fool. I have seen to movie and not read the book, so my understanding is not as deep as some. Nevertheless I offer an alternative view. While he did die, he also really lived. It is not our place to judge his experience. We can never know what he felt. While I imagine his death must have been intensly painful, if we allow our fear of death to dictate our lives, can we really live?

I don’t want to survive. I want to LIVE.

Respect.

#62

Hello “This One”,

I read the book “Into the wild” but haven’t seen the movie yet. The book was very good. I do not think that Chris McCandless was a fool at all… I think that he was naive about real survivial in the wild, after severing the umbilical cord to the outside civilized world. But then niavete goes hand in hand with being young and inexperieinced. I think that he was very brave, daring and willing to take risks so that he could feel truly alive and free. I admire and am inspired by his adventuresome spirit. Even when he realized that he was starving and would soon die, he took one last photo of himself happy and smiling and holding a hand written note for those he was leaving behind…

[center] [/center]

[center]“I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD.
GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!”[/center]

I think that Alex (his road name) perfectly conveys his philosophy of living in the letter he wrote to his 80 year old friend Ron Franz who had befriended him in Salton City CA. He encourages the old man to put a camper on the back of his pickup, give up his apartment, pull up stakes and hit the road, and begin to really experience being alive. I found his letter on the internet, here it is…

"Ron, Alex here. I have been working up here in Carthage South Dakota for nearly two weeks now. I arrived up here three days after we parted in Grand Junction, Colorado. I hope that you made it back to Salton City wihtout too many problems. I enjoy working here and things are going well. The weather is not very badn and many days are surprisingly mild. Some of the farmers are even already going into their fields. It must be getting rather hot down there in Southern California by now. I wonder if you ever got a chance to get out an dsee how many people showed up for the March 20 Rainbow gathering there at the hotsprings. It sounds like it might have been a lot of fun, but I don’t think you really understand these kind of people very well.

I will not be here in South Dakota very much longer. My friend, Wayne, wants me to stay working at the grain elevator through May and then go combining with him the entire summer, but I have my soul set entirely on my Alaskan Odyssey and hope to be on my way no later than April 15. That means I will be leaving here before very long, so I need you to send any more mail I may have received to the return address listed below.

Ron, I really enjoy all the help you have given me and the times we spent together. I hope that you will not be too depressed by our parting. It may be a very long time before we see each other again. But providing that I get through ths Alaskan Deal in one piece you will be hearing form me again in the future. I’d like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing or been to hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one piece of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to this scheme of life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover. Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.

You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.

Ron, I really hope that as soon as you can you will get out of Salton City, put a little camper on the back of your pickup, and start seeing some of the great work that God has done here in the American West. you will see things and meet people and there is much to learn from them. And you must do it economy style, no motels, do your own cooking, as a general rule spend as little as possible and you will enjoy it much more immensely. I hope that the next time I see you, you will be a new man with a vast array of new adventures and experiences behind you. Don’t hesitate or allow yourself to make excuses. Just get out and do it. Just get out and do it. You will be very, very glad that you did.

Take care Ron,

Alex"

The old man did as Alex had encouraged him to do, but instead of living on the road, he camped out in the nearby desert at the same campsite where Alex had camped for 2 months, and he waited for Alex to return. One day he picked up a couple of hitchhikers who started talking about an article in “Outside magazine” about a young kid who was found starved to death in the Alaska Wilderness… and he knew it was his friend Alex.

From your post, it sounds like you are yearning for the same things that Chris was yearning for. I guess the only person that really holds us back from chasing our wildest dreams is ourself. I know the feeling of being trapped by my own fears and inhibitions. Once we can overcome that gatekeeper, we can begin to really live feeely. I think you are on the right track.

I have compiled a list of links to interesting McCandless webpages, including that first article “Death of an Innocent” that appeared in “Outside Magazine” in 1993

http://outside.away.com/outside/features/1993/1993_into_the_wild_1.html

More McCandless Links:

http://www.pullingforwildflowers.org/indx-into-wild-vid.htm

Orion >>

#63

I am constantly inspired by the beautiful people who frequent this board.

Thank you all for being so beautiful.

#64

If someone asked me to rewild with them the next day would I go?

NO!.. I would need at least 1 month to prepare.

Today is

Tuesday, Febuary 24th, 2009

I am rewilding…

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

I only stumbled onto this site while doing a little last minute research and saying my goodbyes to online friends.

“Speech without action is just breath without life.”

Dan

#65

I hope if people did go, that they survived and are well and happy.

Does anyone know?

#66

(I know I’m reviving a dead thread here)

One of my biggest discoveries about rewilding is that it is different for everybody. Derrick Jensen himself said, “We need everything.” I understand that rewilding is a process, not just walking off into the wilderness alone. However, it may help some people (myself included) to spend periods of time alone in the wilderness. As much as I love my community, it definitely helps me to be alone in nature. I love sitspots and nature observation, and there are many times when I just need a break from human interaction. Of course, I go back to my community, but the time I spend alone can help clarify my thoughts, and even help me when dealing with others.

Sometimes we find answers when we are surrounded by them, other times we find answers when there are none.

It definitely doesn’t seem to make sense to just walk off. I have a feeling that if I walked off into the woods with a tribe of people, we could definitely manage. But planning is vital. How long until we need to move on? How long until we need a tool that none of us have ever made? How long until we enter a season in which our plant knowledge is limited? How long until park rangers discover us and haul us off to jail? How long until tensions mount and fights break out, because we don’t know each other well and aren’t able to sufficiently mediate.

These concerns aren’t meant to shy anyone off of their paths. Pressure to innovate can help some discover more, and being pushed almost to the limit ends up increasing one’s limits. But things don’t always work out the way we want them to. It’s way better to be safe than sorry, especially concerning something as vital as rewilding.

I definitely want to spend a few months living primitively in the woods. But I know that I wouldn’t want to be alone for more than a year. I know that this journey wouldn’t be the end result of rewilding, just another adventure on my journey. I know that I need to get my skills up to par. I know that I need to become familiar with the area where I would do this. I also know that I can’t plan this myself; I need to reach out to others. Unless you interact frequently with the people you would like to embark on this journey with (and even then), planning for potential pitfalls could take as long as the journey itself.

Do what you need to rewild, but be smart about it. It’s foolish to run into the car barreling down the road towards you. And don’t become utterly dependent on community (vital as it is) but remember that community can definitely help on a rewilding path.

#67

good solid thoughts from a young man … I recently did a series of articles that I call the Feral Woodsman. on my forum Dirttime.com , you might find it interesting. you have to work backwards on the site as it is updated with new articles all the time , there are about 15 articles on the Feral Woodsman.

Dude

#68

If asked to go into the wilderness today, I would not go because today that is not my task. There is work here for me that needs to be done. I’ve lived in nature for 2 or 3 months at a time before. My contentedness comes from knowing that the wilderness is still out there, and I can leave any minute I choose. The wilderness is my safety net! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: I enjoy having the freedom to choose, to come and go from civilization as I see fit. And I’m really excited to be out there again cast to the wind this summer! Until then, I feel my work and winter/spring obligations are more important.