Let’s get this settled once and for all, people. An unsafe life in freedom is always, always better than a supposedly safe one in captivity. This goes for both animals and humans and it has nothing to do with your own free will. It is a matter of the existence of life itself.

For the past months, pretty much nothing I have been doing has been safe, probably not much of it legal either. In just getting up in the morning and climbing out of bed I’m most likely violating several laws and regulations invented for what is termed ‘my own safety’. I have never been happier. And I never knew why before now. And it’s not about the rush, it’s not about roaming about, doing who and what I please.

In western philosophy, freedom been given a problem of justification, of relativisation, explained as a personal matter, as being able to say words you find pleasing and wear the clothes you like. It has been reduced to a hypothetical question of free will, and then caught up in the discussion if there is such a thing as will at all. Or worse, reduced to a consumers choice of breakfast cereals. But it goes far beyond that.

If incarcerated, either by force or by the more subtle means of a net of expectations and invented needs, or just the massive overbuilding of cities, making houses a necessity as everything else is made unpleasant or impossible, it’s not your free will that suffers the most, it’s your attachment to the earth. The possibility to be part of a greater network of life that is night and light and day and death, of the mould and the fungi. It is having severed every little thread that attached you to the previous and the possible lives, from the great old trees to the tiny mayfly.  Most people today might not be aware of this, but your bodies are, even if your minds don’t have the language. By making freedom about the individual, and an individual choice, we’re really making it into a concept to be discussed rather than the obvious way of living.

I have earlier written about the fear of the dark indoors, and it’s this. The fear of knowing that you’re not part of life, and in a way, already dead, or in the limbo that civilisation is. Nowadays, there are really no places left to be truly free, for everything is touched by civilisation, and the freedom you have is really mostly marginalisation in society. But I believe it’s possible to push those margins until they become a space.

To be locked indoors is to be denied communication with trees and rain and shift your body through existence knowing that you interact with a greater network of life. And to have someone believe they can decide where your body goes, in life and in death, is to claim a piece of matter away from life itself.

To remove anything from the cycle of life and death is, indeed, the only true evil. It has nothing to do with your soul, or what western people think of as the soul, or gods, or a succession of new humans. It has to do with the physical pieces needed to make other things, to make life possible.

These claims will probably disturb a lot of kind, well meaning people, who want to protect their loved ones, human and animal, from harm, but you can’t. And it is the invention of the idea that you can that is really killing the earth.

This, I will get back to in my next post.