Thanks for all the messages, questions and concerns about the Land Liberation Project and the current whereabouts of the Tipi People and Tipi Village.
The October deadline for the sale of the Summer Land came and went without us and without the funds to enter into the 'property purchase' reality. As far as we know, Soda Mountain has not yet changed 'ownership'. All of the money raised through Indiegogo is being held with the Way Foundation. The rest is still in the Magic Hat.
We moved off the mountain in October, like we usually do, and a new place to spend a gentler winter revealed itself. The Big Lodge was pitched and we moved into our lodges from there. There was an early period of about a foot of snow and temperatures low enough to freeze a glass of water on the hearth overnight. The narrow portal of solstice came and went, as it does, and the short essential days gave the power of the epic now of equanamous adversity. As they do...
The entire 2000+ acres of (Mosby) Buckhorn Ranch is still on the market for some $4+m. It would be good to see all of this land free from mechanical and commercial development and returned to it's inherent indigenous nature.
I am still trying to reconcile the liberation of The Land with abstract tools of enslavement, such as money. If anyone out there has any ideas about how to go about the emancipation of our world, please share it! In the meantime I guess we'll just keep making it up as we go along and continue to strive to live as directly and accountably as possible.
This is not in opposition to idustrialisation. The process of industrialisation has been important, necessary and has great cultural value for humanity. However, for as long as it is stuck in the paradigm of 'development' meaning consumption, convenience and an idea that everyone is to follow the model of 'Western' affluence, then it's hard to see any future other than a continuing loss of cultural and biological diversity, and environmental abuse and degradation, ultimately leading to mass extinctions including that of our own species.
So, to the 'industrialised' world (meaning, mostly, the minority of the world's population who defacate in water), we are on the same side and the Land Liberation Project does not need to become a revolutionary movement. We can, any of us if we like, slip off into the woods and re-indigenise ourselves and our world. This does not mean that we can urbanise the wilderness or even settle, claim and own. It means that we can begin to acknowledge our place within the shimmering web of interconnections and empower that web through empowering ourselves by enabling agency in our own lives by having accessible opportunity to take care of our basics. Like shelter, food, water, heat and waste.
One of my favourite factoids goes, 'Termites outweigh humans 3:1'. Outweigh. Not outnumber. This comes up whenever the question of human overpopulation arises. If we accept the UN estimate that seven thousand million people now live on Earth, then the human equivalent to termites would be 21 billion people. Therefore termites remember something that some of us are either forgetting or ignoring out of the seductions of convenience. Termites have Indigenous Knowledge in the sense of connected ways of being being intergrated and connected with the whole.
Pre (non)- industrial and certainly pre (non)- agricultural cultures have an awareness of place within the connections of the weave of creation, or life, that does not need to be reconciled and is woven into daily living. For example, it is difficult to be naïve or ignorant to how one treats the water when one fetches and drinks that water.
Since the onset of industrialisation we have been becoming more and more removed from our visceral, direct impact, through the convenience of inventions such as the flushing toilet, for example. We don't have to deal with our shit. Physically and metophorically. It goes to that place known as 'away'. Of course, sewers were essential when cities were rife with cholera, dysentry etc., but they were a specific treatment to a specific problem, or collective symptom. Now we are beginning to be faced with water scarcity, not just in dry parts of the world. Sewage has always been an issue for sedentary populations. We've always known that our manure returns to the biosphere, eventually, but untill fairly recently, urban dwellers didn't know how to utilise manure as a nutrient rich resource, rather than an energy intensive 'problem'.
All this is an example of how now, on the cusp of the industrial and post-industrial ages, we get to define with fully empowered input, post-industrialisation.
A neo-indigenous understanding of our place within the weave of living appears to be essential for a viable way forward. For me, this means living on the ground around the fire in a circle of circles. Fetching wood with a bow saw and walking to the spring for water. It's handy for much of my practice of conscious awareness is intergrated within my essential daily life; I don't know how to have the discipline to be as aware of my direct impact on my place within the weave amidst the mass culture of conveinience living.
So the highest values which the industrialised world espouses are, largely, of liberty, democracy, equality and the like. These are all virtuous. But industrialisation goes beyond that when lives are conscripted and compromise is imposed and when me, my family and my community find ourselves, not through choice, fending off the accepted default of 'ownership'.
To compromise my life by working an uninspired job to feed the machine of industrialisation so that little 'I' can 'own' my own little plot of land so that I can live directly makes no sense, is illogical and perpetuates a dysfunctional, greedfull, individualistic paradigm.
So I'll keep living directly and openly, finding a way forward with a wholesome intention for the greatest good. Perhaps one day those politicians will make provision for indigenous nomadic ways of living, as times keep on changing. Or perhaps a philanthropist with a strong heart and clear vision will come forward in recognition of the urgency of the now. However it goes, the time for waiting is over and the time for epic living is now. As it always was.
-Ande
