Roots

On August 1, 2020 By tone melbyeLeave a comment

I didn’t just set out living in a small, self-made cabin on wheels with no running water or electricity entirely on a whim. The cabin where I spent a lot of time as a kid and where I’m now staying forms much of the ideas for and practice for my current house.

img_20200729_163402938 — The old meisterherd oven, still the best cooking apparatus I’ve lived with and a lot of the reason I feel more at home in places with a fireplace you can cook on.

The cabin is on a peninsula by a fjord, so there’s no fresh water, no electricity or other so-called modern facilities. There is, or was, peace and quiet, living creatures and weird things in the woods.

img_20200730_125012394 — So, behind this mound lies (what’s probably) an old viking gravesite on the cabin next to ours. Every owner of that property has met an untimely end or personal ruin, just saying.

The cabin is not by any sane standards ‘primitive’, it’s quite full of comfortable solutions, like a cooling cabinet dug close to the rock that will keep drinks chilled and most not-terribly perishable foods, like eggs and cheese, preserved. Most of these ideas I’ve grown up with and could in various ways adapt to my wagon.

I really believe spending so much time here made me better prepared for a life on the road, for finding solutions to a lifestyle on the edge of society. There are so many small things that needs to be learned, or better, internalized as a way of being, of moving. As an adult, I probably would have had a harder time getting used to little tings like not throwing out the water you boiled your morning eggs in purely on reflex, or collecting rain water for washing.

There is a lot (well, not a lot, not as much as it should be, but more than a while ago) of talk about adapting to climate change and system collapse. A growing number of people are starting to doubt that their current lives are going to continue along the same lines. And very often, we are presented with a bunch of ‘smart’ solutions. That we can buy. For a price. But the key to adapting is really quite simple. You look, and you listen.

You look at where you actually, physically are, and what else is there. And you listen to your surroundings. Water is not always above ground, animal paths lead ways through the forest. Because as much as I have picked up clever ways of cooling by drinks and storing water, the main thing I learnt by being largely self reliant, is that things really exist. It sounds obvious, but it’s something largely gone from our modern minds. We live on the planet as if it’s already dead and we’re the only real creatures left on in. Some delve into fantasies about living in simulations or illusions.

But things are real, even the things you can’t see. You can live outside society, but it takes a lot more room and a lot more practice than just casting the yoke and running off. And while money doesn’t grow on trees, food actually does. Unless some mad bastard has chopped them down to make money.

The curse of the ninth

On June 14, 2020June 14, 2020 By tone melbye2 Comments

IMG_20200612_155006932_HDR — This shore will always hold a mystery

Lately, I’ve vacated my house, la Chouette to do maintenance work on a family cabin. Since my dad passed away, it hasn’t been much in use. My mom doesn’t drive and I have no siblings and obviously I’m not going live in a fixed place, so we’re going to sell it. I have a lot of happy memories from this place, so I’ll hate to see it go, but I can’t keep something just for the sake of keeping it.

When I was little, this is where we’d go to get away from everything. There’s no electricity, there are kerosene lamps, an old cast iron stove, an outdoor toilet and if you want fresh meat for dinner, you’ll have to go fish (you could also try hunting in the woods, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The terrain is not for people). When building my own dream home, I leaned heavily on my experiences from summers here, such as how to make water last, what I need and what’s only distractions.

It’s also a special place because my dad built it himself, and there are numerous caring details and features that gives the cabin soul and heart.

However, in the last years before his death, and as his heart condition grew worse (that’s not what killed him, ironically), my dad also fell ill with the same madness that seems to spread everywhere. The madness of expansion over maintenance. Now, starting something new is always more fun than finishing something. And especially to a creative person. But at some point, the constant starting of new things becomes pathological.

Since I was there last, two new sun deck have been built around the cabin, one more apparently planned and a boat house large enough to live in has taken the place of the quay. There is also an incomprehensible doorway in the middle of the path to the cabin that I can’t for the life of me figure what was going to do. At the same time, the woodwork in the existing structure is, while not beyond hope, clearly bearing signs of neglect, and there is a water damage in one of the bedrooms. Still pretty easy to fix, but it’s been there for some time. Little things that needed to be done regularly has clearly been set aside in favor of new and completely unnecessary projects. Also, the cabin itself has been filled with various items that probably seemed useful in the store, but has no place or use at all in the daily life in the woods by the sea. It was a well-equipped cabin with integrity, and didn’t need to be filled with cheap junk.

And it seems everyone is building pointless things and filling every available space with junk.

Right now, there is a massive building of wind turbines in Norway. I saw them mar the landscape in Denmark and Germany, and now they’re filling the coast and mountains here. Whole islands are being covered in turbines up to 150m height, killing birds and insects and making the area uninhabitable for anyone, human or other animal. Most of these turbines are built to cater to the European marked and to the lie of cheap and sustainable energy. The lie of the plenty is destroying the planet we live on.

It’s not just the turbines. Mining, logging, road construction and the very last drop of oil, all destructive and disruptive human activity is madly speeding up, while at the same time it’s more and more obvious that the kind of world that these roads and skyscrapers and cities are made for is not going to happen. The brave new plastic sci-fi world of the post ww2 era was a terrible idea and now it’s dying. Globalism is failing, all the larger states are failing, and let’s face it, humanity is failing.

It might be, at some level, that this is the same phenomenon at play. That, in addition to the usual greed and stupidity that plague the species, humans in the ‘civilized’ world might also be experiencing the same madness that came over my dad before he died. His health was deteriorating, he must have known his time was running out. And I do think most humans also know at some level that the world as we know it is dying too. Yet I think people have a belief that if you start something, death will patiently wait and let you finish it. A belief that unfinished business will keep you linked to the world for longer, but to finish something, is to die.

As an artist, I experience this too. The fear of the finished piece, the curse of the ninth. It’s always there at the back of the brain. And of course, my own house won’t ever be finished. But it does have the advantage of obvious limitations, if I want to add a new thing, something else has to go, and I have to finish what I start. The need for change and hunger for expansion is probably present in all things, but as I said, at some point it becomes pathological. Life might be expansion, but at some point the growth becomes cancerous (it was cancer that got my dad in the end, by the way).

But death doesn’t wait any more than life does. And you can’t cheat death, because it’s not playing a game. Even if our culture is littered with stories about how cheating death is a good and brave thing, it isn’t. Perhaps the time has come now for humanity to finish their symphony and care for what they have while they can.

Let the river run

On March 25, 2020 By tone melbye2 Comments

IMG_20200321_123522412 — Ok, perhaps more of a brook, but you get the point.

A river without a riverbank is not a river

but neither is a river a river if it doesn’t run.

Today I had a small insect bite under my left eye and I spent an hour or so being certain it would be the death of me.

Not because this was very likely, but because I was indoors. Outside, I would hardly notice

I don’t mean outside like out in the yard, but on the road, in the real.

The world inside walls is not real, because it is not connected. It’s not connected because nothing will recycle your body when you die. Well, eventually, but it will take an unnatural amount of time. There is no way to trust your instincts when you’re cut off from the cycle of life and death, it’s like having your whiskers cut off, I have no sense of proportions, indoors.

These days, a lot of people are spending a lot more time indoors than usually, because of restrictions put on very large populations in order to try to control an outbreak of an infectious disease.

I had already planned a time of seclusion to work on my book of hours, and I’m honestly not sure what I would do if I was on the road when the restrictions came into place.

I do know that the lockdown we’re experiencing globally now shows a great flaw in the system of borders and countries. A world that consists only of owned land and borders, with no or few vast spaces between, is suffocating. And it shows when there is no place to run. There are, for now, and for a few, places to hide. But only for the privileged, and you can’t hide for ever.

What is happening now show the need for human dwellings to be the exception, not the norm, of the face of the earth. There needs to be places to go, and to avoid human contact without locking yourself indoors or facing an outside with no food, no water and no functioning life.

For a very long time, human life has not been allowed to breathe, for it has been denied to know death.

Life and death are never enemies, it merely seems so because humans have been trading the life of everything around them in order to prolong their own form. Not merely to sustain it, but to keep clinging to it far beyond any reason. But life is not the temporary form of the individual.

Life does not happen after death, but in death, as death happens in life, at every moment, and at once.

Life is a song.

A song starts and ends. It has a form, but you cannot take one note and say that this is the truth of the song. A song must change, but it changes after a pattern. It is a temporary harmonious meeting of a myriad of notes, of cells and microbes, and tiny organisms in and around you, the heartbeat and the lyrics.

There is a lot of high talk about ‘winning’ over diseases of all kinds, and of beating it at all costs. But it’s presented as if there is a government who pay the price and it isn’t, it’s nature.

Whenever the question of the cost of a life arises, it’s only ever talked about monetary costs, never about actual costs. Nowhere do you see an account of how many rivers are dried up, swamps drained, moors burned or forests chopped down to build hospitals, pharmaceutical factories or windmills for electricity for life-prolonging machines.

This is not a question of attacking the weak and the ill, not a question of survival of the more adapted, but of humans accepting their mortality.

Everything living already have a life, it’s never a question of fighting for a life, it’s a question of prolonging what is already there.

Death is not the enemy of life, but the beginning and the end of it. it is a very long stretch from maintaining a life to destroying everything in your wake to expand it. To survive at any cost at some point stops being brave and becomes greedy.

I certainly don’t want to die, and I’ll gladly feed on other life. But I hardly think it’s worth destroying entire ecosystems simply to prolong my existence a bit.

Otherwise, after all, you’ll have nowhere to go after you die. Nothing for your biomass or soul to be reabsorbed in.

So when I get panic attacks and anxiety from minor things indoors, it’s being disconnected I fear, death in the form of stagnation. The true death.

And that is something to be afraid of.

A celebration of the darkness on the shortest day

On December 21, 2019December 21, 2019 By tone melbye2 Comments

IMG_20191221_130549773 — My portrait of Hel, or Hela, the ruler of the underworld in Norse mythology, and a bit more for those of us not constricted to the åsatru versions.

As readers know, I do love Christmas, or Yule as it’s called where I’m from (spelled Jul nowadays). The food, the candles, the more or less gaudy representations of nisser, the constant sugar-rush and high flying emotions. Love it.

But none of these things are for me meant to ‘drive away the darkness’ as the popular phrase goes. I carve out a tiny little den, slightly less dark than the enormous darkness of the long night, and curl up and rest. Without darkness, sleep would be made quite difficult. And sleep is the most wonderful thing. Also, quite a lot of animals prefer the darkness for their activities.

Darkness has a really bad reputation in most current cultures. It is still associated with basically all the stuff humans don’t like, a sort of umbrella term for anything unpleasant or unwanted. Even by those who know intellectually that this isn’t true, and that darkness is as necessary for life as light is, the darkness has a tendency to be pushed aside into, well, the dark.

Without darkness, there would be no renewal. It’s not an opposite, but a prerequisite. Without darkness, life would be a single, unending, hectic rush towards a messy end, probably good for capitalist production values, but an absolute horror for anything else. Without darkness, humans forget that they do not own the planet or has any prior claim to it, no right to mess about with its ecosystems in an attempt of adjusting or ‘fixing’ nature. Without darkness, you will never really experience awe for nature.

For those who pay a bit of attention to the current world, it’s not the darkness that poses the biggest threat to a living earth, but the light. Or to be precise, artificial light made by humans to drive away the darkness. Electric lights, along with pesticides and other weapons you use against nature being nature, is a key factor in the ongoing insect apocalypse, the decimation of insects on earth. And without insects, most known life will struggle to exist.

The aggressive attitude towards darkness, wielded mainly by those who count themselves as ‘good’ is a reminder of the ongoing war against nature that humans have believed themselves to be fighting for some time now. Perhaps they should stop and realize that they’re only fighting themselves, and making everything else suffer in the process. A good place to start is to contemplate and celebrate the vast and important, soothing and covering, darkness.

Lighting a candle makes the darkness easier to see, It doesn’t drive it away, but brings it closer to mind.

So light a candle, or a lovely fire, tonight in praise of the darkness, who will let you go to bed early with a book and a mug of mulled wine without feeling the least bit of fomo or guilt.

Sweet dreams.

Symphony of destruction

On August 16, 2019August 16, 2019 By tone melbyeLeave a comment

To create, one must destroy. This also is true for furniture.

Throwback to me in a former dwelling in 2014, not sure why it suddenly came to mind. Anyway, on with the post…

I have, after a year of living in my house, found that I’m quite fond of having my afternoon nap on the sofa. While it’s a lovely sofa, it’s also just not quite long enough to sleep on comfortably. Originally, the length was determined by the proximity to the fireplace and a fear that a longer sofa would be a fire hazard. However, the heat from the fireplace is distributed differently than I expected, and I can safely move a step closer to the flames.

As I said, it’s a lovely sofa and I want to keep it, I only want to change it a bit. But I’ll need to take it apart first, and this is frightening. The good thing is that since I made the sofa myself, I know how it’s put together and I know that the different pieces are not merged so closely that they can’t be made into something new.

Taking something apart is just as much, if not more work than putting it together. At least if you want to be able to use the pieces again. It would have been much simpler just to tear the armrest off. Much, much simpler. Let me demonstrate with a series of pictures:

The rebuilding of one of my favorite parts of my house is only possible because the pieces are intact. I could, of course, have destroyed the former ones, gone out and bought new material and remade the whole thing but that would be just plain stupid. The point here is that destruction is not evil, it’s a needed part of life. Nothing static is alive.

From this perspective, it could be presumed that the current mass ecocide is not a great crisis in the greater picture, that perhaps this is just another turn of the wheel.

But there is a great difference between de-assembling and re-assembling building blocks and just trampling down everything like some great big hulking thing. Or worse, constructing things that are so melted down they cannot be taken apart and turned into something different.

And this is why the human destruction of the planet is a crisis. It’s not mere destruction, but a meltdown of the very building blocks. This is evidently clear in nuclear reactors or the invention of plastic, which I have ranted about before and which I elaborate on and link to ideas of immortality in modern interpretations of Norse religion in a closer look at Loke’s contribution to the death of Balder.

It can also be seen in the way they keep removing matter from the cycle of life, primarily their own bodies. When dead, humans destroy their bodies by pumping them full of poison or burning them and enclosing them in stone and in lead, or in more plastic. And then they poison everything that tries to make use of this much needed matter, the fungi and earthworm and scavenger. It may not seem as much, but is says a lot about how humans think of themselves, as the point and end of all things, as something on top of a pyramid, as the apex of creation. With this mindset, there will soon not be any more creation.

Humans aren’t just destroying, they’re depleting. And they’re doing it in the name of the good and just as well as greed. It is time to step into the circle once more and see the world around you not as something to conquer or consume, not even to protect, but as your next self.

Right, now I will go have a nap on my sofa. And then I will start to take apart my roof.

Anniversary. Or: The hunt for nightmares begins.

On August 7, 2019August 7, 2019 By tone melbyeLeave a comment

IMG_20190628_150828636_HDR (2) — there’s a hint here to my upcoming plans

Yesterday marked one year since my first night in la Chouette, the first step towards making the house a home. Building a house by yourself from scratch, there are no indicators for at what point the heap of planks and nails and bits and pieces becomes a home. No one tells you this. No estate agent or landlord will stand by to convince you why this particular amount of enclosed air is a home.

Now it is a home and I have almost already forgotten how it was like to live enclosed in society. Looking back, it was hellish. That’s not to say my lifestyle is careless or easy.

Recently there was an article about tiny houses in a Norwegian paper. There was a feature of me, and an interview with an informal college where students could build a tiny house as one of the activities. The headline read ‘Tiny houses can make your life simpler’.

I have no idea what part of the interview they got that from. Certainly not from me.

While building and living in a house on wheels of a moderate size, popularly referred to as ‘tiny’ house, has turned out well for me, it’s not by any means a simple life. That was never the point.

To be clear, you don’t rid yourself of any problems this way, but you do get a whole set of interesting new ones. I think I have said that before. And often.

While building, I worried a lot about keeping the rain out, about how I would do my cooking, cleaning, where to get wood chips for my compost toilet, and about all the rules and regulations on the road. None of this has really been very important.

The house definitely has a better indoor climate than anywhere I’ve lived, and this has had a remarkably positive effect on my health.

The main part for me was to get away from noise. Not just from cars and neighbors with sick ideas of ‘fun’, such as actually listening to dubstep and tribal trance, but also from the drone of windmills, the angry hum of solar panels or electric car chargers and air conditions.

The downside to this is that you notice very clearly how few places of quiet are left. How the noise pollution is everywhere and increasing with every ‘green’ invention.

You become very aware of the difference it makes to be 8 rather than 4 billion people on the planet, as there was when I was little.

And this is the downside.

The roads are not places for travel, but for being chased from one place to another and there are few places to stop. Nearly all land is regulated, fenced off or built on. While the house has turned out like I wanted, the world has little place for freedom. The problems you face are mainly about how to maintain your balance. Not on the edge of society, because that no longer exists. There is no outside, it’s all been drained to feed the human fantasy of supremacy. The balance is on the edge of the existing and the not-yet real.

I have already made real a not-before existing type of house. In the time to come, I will continue to shift reality. I have plans to delve into the very place for the collective nightmares of western Europe and see what’s really there. And if it can be brought forward from the stories.

How to be vulnerable, part 1

On July 12, 2019July 12, 2019 By tone melbyeLeave a comment

IMG_20190709_150811423_HDR — Nearly relevant, but quite pretty image of my house in its current position.

Today I spent the whole day sanding down, washing and waxing my kitchen.

After nearly a year of living and moving, the floor boards are stained, the racks for the pots are knocked out of whack, and there’s a general air of ingrown dinners over the kitchen area.

And as I’m sanding down the pine, first with a coarse grade, then a finer, I come to thinking that while there are plenty of tools and advice around on how to seal things off and close a structure, it’s surprisingly difficult to find tools and ways to keep and maintain an open structure, or, to maintain your vulnerability while not being permanently wounded.

My house is a vulnerable structure. It’s pretty open to the elements in its construction and the materials are not impregnated or heavily treated. This is a conscious choice, to live with something living instead of building a tomb. As I said before, I’m deeply uncomfortable in most modern houses for the reason that they feel like something meant to die in rather than something built for living things.

But a living thing needs care, it needs upkeep, and to find the balance of closing and opening is the hardest thing any living organism will face. Too open, and you’ll rot or be eaten alive, to closed and you’ll suffocate or starve.

I recall how, back when I was building, I went to get a piece of marine plywood for what was going to be the first attempt on a hatch to access my roof terrace. I went to the store, found the piece I wanted, checked the specifics, and then I asked the sales attendant if the material could handle the rain, meaning that it would not rot when wet in a hurry., as some materials do. He then regarded me with an expression as if I had made a lewd suggestion involving the two of us and a diseased aardvark. When he regained his composure, he carefully explained how I needed to buy a special kind of lacquer and a thinner, sand down the wood, lacquer it with a quite thinned mixture, wait for about two days, repeat, and repeat again at least five times with thicker mixtures of lacquer and thinner. I took a look at what the lacquer and thinner contained, panicked, thanked him for his time and left.

There are oils, tar solutions, techniques and mixtures you can use to keep wood longer while not building a bio hazard. But a lot of this knowledge is lost and what is left is heavily guarded and not easily accessible to the common crowd or amateur builder, such as me. And most of the building industry is based on the idea that everything has to last forever, or you’ve failed.

Of course I spin this thought further as dinner dust is clogging up my throat and dulling down my clothes. And I think about how we’re taught to do this with our bodies and our minds, making them rain proof, death proof, indestructible and by this, becoming already dead and a walking bio hazard, as most houses are.

And we have very few tools to really maintain our minds and bodies. A lot to close them off and fixing them, few on how to care for on a daily, living basis as something living and interacting. This idea I will explore in part two, coming up.

The place of dead roads

On May 28, 2019May 28, 2019 By tone melbye1 Comment

IMG_20190528_082330 — It seemed more fun when Burroughs wrote about it.

I said that I would return to matters of life and death, and now I am. I have reached the place of dead roads. The map, inner or outer, no longer works. I’m still hovering on the outskirts of the London cancer, wondering how to cross.

Not only are the roads physically broken by potholes and cracked concrete, blocked by constant accidents and aimless digging, but the very network of roads in this place is broken, or never worked. It is increasingly clear that the roads here were all forced upon the land and the land and rivers and lines themselves tampered with to fit human needs.

Also, the inner map and navigation system is out of function. The goals and destinations I had in mind either don’t exist or has ceased to carry meaning. The reason for this is to be found in stories.

The more I travel, and the more I move to the outskirts of mind, body and civilization, there are two narratives, two mental threads, or roads, that emerge.

One is the story of the individual immortality. Unlike Burroughs, I can’t accept the way gods and the soul is presented to us. In all the stories we know, the individual has a body that perishes and a soul that is, or has the capacity to move on to, something everlasting. Often there are gods involved. Either to hinder the process, to further it, or as something to merge with at the end of the journey.

In some narratives, the body, or a representation of it, follows the soul, recreating an image of the person. In some, the soul is moved on to another being, but usually as a whole, self-contained set of memories and ideas.

What is however becoming increasingly clear in the world, is that in the attempt to reach longevity or individual immortality, humans have ruined their hope to survive, in any form. They have eaten up the earth and taken away the matter of their bodies, removed it from the cycle to be re-used. They have killed almost all other beings to make room for their offspring, their self-images. In their ideas of gods, human shaped or abstracted, they have removed themselves from the cycle of life and death.

There are, of course, images, ideas and stories about the circle, but always tainted with the implication that the human spirit is different, better in a way. And while people can read and understand words about becoming one with nature, we have no real stories for it, and therefor we can’t understand what it means. The closest I can think of are Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and they don’t really cover it.

Also, those that denounce the spirit, do so in everything, because to them, if humans can’t have a soul, nothing can.

I like living as much as the next squirrel, eel or badger, I enjoy having a body. I’m rather attached to it. But the body is made of matter, of cells. They come from something, from somewhere. From what you eat and drink and breathe. All human practice surrounding life and death has been an attempt of closing these cells off, hindering them to go back to the earth. To encapsulate them in stone, to freeze them in space and time, to burn them before the fungi and earthworm get to take back what we have borrowed. Because we do borrow all our matter from the earth. Not from your parents or children, not other humans, not some god. From nature. From everything that we construct ourselves of.

We are told that the pyramids are great achievements, that human immortality is a good and great goal and it isn’t. It’s a horror. It has always been and can only be a horror.

And all the things we are told to want are somehow linked up to this. Every item, every garden, everything constructed or spun as a story. Everything we think we know and think we want. The whole idea of self fulfillment, contrasted to being ruled over by gods or humans and given as the only option to this, gives rise to dreams and images that can only be sterile still life. We think of the scavenger and of rot as something vile, but it’s our only way to reach anything close to immortality. To be part of life and death once more. Your roads are broken because your stories are broken.

Human civilization holds nothing for me and the wild, the real, the world that balances itself, is temporarily ruined. And human tampering with it only makes matters worse, because it is done with the same, broken stories as guidelines.

To possibly slightly twist the meaning of the words of Poe; The play is the tragedy man and the hero the conqueror worm.

Coming up: The need for a new apocalypse.

We need to talk about water, again

On May 14, 2019May 14, 2019 By tone melbye2 Comments

I have posted bits about water before, about the relation to rain, about the way and the road, but there is also the everyday need for and constant search for water.

IMG_20190513_181019016 — and we’re searching…

Recently, social media has been picking up an article from last summer from the guardian about plastic bottles.

The article and the response circles around the need to recycle the bottles, or call to companies to use recycled plastic in their bottles. The reporter also blames the want for a ‘western lifestyle’ for the bottled water consumption in countries like China. This is both arrogant and helps hide the real problem.

The real problem is that practically all fresh water sources are being held hostage by governments or companies. When outside the system, you see this clearly, but seldom have a voice to point it out.

To get access to water, you need to buy your way into the system, one way or the other. You need a house, or similar, either hooked up to a pipe system, or with large enough tanks to find and store water yourself. This water you either need to buy, indirectly by being at a caravan site or boat dock, or clean and filter yourself, something that also requires time, space and money. Or, of course, steal and risk being pushed even further away from the government-stolen necessities.

For now, I have the option of checking in to campsites now and then and fill the water tanks with safe, clean water, but not all do. Also, not all have a house or a car or anywhere to store water for longer periods of time. Some gas stations will let you fill your tanks, but you need to get to them somehow. And means to transport the water. And water is bloody heavy.

When poor and stuck in urban life, as a lot of people are, bottle water, expensive, polluting, and often not particularly good, is your only choice. Restaurants will leave bowls of water out for dogs, but not for poor people. Finding fresh water in a city can be a desperate search, and while food can be foraged in dumpsters, clean water can’t.

The fact that it has even gotten to this is the real tragedy and the real problem. And it won’t go away even if every single plastic bottle is recycled and reused. They should not exist in the first place.

Why freedom is always better

On May 8, 2019May 8, 2019 By tone melbye2 Comments

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.

IMG_20190507_074151038_HDR — Always. Even when the pleasant looking green on the ground are poison nettles that burn.

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.

tinyowl

Tag: life