List Number One -- Things that were inspiring, refreshing, fascinating, or otherwise really cool:
1. Not wearing shoes for four days. I left them in the car and went barefoot.
2. Little kids running around naked and playing in mud without being told to put clothes on or wash up.3. Sleeping in a tent in a pine forest.
4. Earthy looking mothers breast feeding infants (and almost-two-year-olds) without anyone being uncomfortable or insisting they wear one of those little cover-yourself-up-lest-we-be-offended breastfeeding capes.5. Meeting and learning from people who could go out in the wilderness and live entirely off the land, trapping and fishing and hunting and finding water and building shelters. Civilization hasn’t left many of these folks around, but I’d like to count myself in their number some day.
6. Being able to learn and experience skills and knowledge our ancestors had for thousands and thousands of years but that in the last two or three hundred years we’ve lost, like making fire or tanning hides or identifying medicinal plants.
7. Men in kilts. Men without shirts. Men with beards!
8. Un-judgmental hippies, like Natalie Bogwalker, the woman who runs the camp and who taught the hide tanning class I went to. She’d make comments like, “Yeah, I used to think ‘Oh, I need to do this the primitive way! But I’ll tell you, this PVC pipe has made my life so much easier. I figured my 20s were for idealism, and now in my 30s I can be realistic.’”
9. Kids running around fighting with sticks and swimming in the lake and climbing things, with no parents in sight. Parents looking for their missing children calmly and without panicking, knowing they’d find them eventually and that kids are supposed to run around and play without their parents. I hope I can be that kind of parent.
10. Natalie Bogwalker, the hide tanner, told us that she had recently butchered a lamb for her friends’ wedding feast. I just loved that it was a ‘feast.’ People in the Bible always seemed to be having wedding feasts, and doesn't a feast sounds so much more joyful and exuberant than a ‘reception’?
11. I went to a class called “When the Shit Hits the Fan” that was supposed to be about how to survive after we reach peak oil/find ourselves in a massive economic collapse/reach the earth’s carrying capacity and suffer a severe drop in population/the apocalypse happens/other nasty disaster scenarios, etc. etc. It was supposed to be about all this before it veered into batshit crazy land (more in List Number Two), but the point is that I realized how woefully unprepared I am to survive without all the infrastructure and services we take for granted. Like if my water and my power went out, and we ran out of gas so I couldn’t drive and the grocery stores were looted and empty, what would I do? I’d like to not feel so helpless, so this list item falls under the category of inspiring/terrifying me into learning more on my own. It also made me want to buy land and learn to shoot a gun.
12. Learning about some edible and medicinal wild plants. This is something I totally am going to learn more about on my own. (This is Indian Tobacco, or Lobelia. You can use it as an anti-spasmodic if someone's having an asthma attack.)
(Not my photo. http://www.prairiemoon.com/image.php?id=2480&type=D)13. When (part of) our culture puts so much effort into pretending that men and women are exactly the same and should do exactly the same things (What a waste if a woman chooses to stay at home with children! She could be doing REAL things with her life!) because the only real difference between the sexes is genitalia and the habit of leaving up the toilet seat, it was refreshing to hear people acknowledge (even celebrate) that traditional cultures have always had a division of labor, and that women are designed to care for children (hence the breasts) while men then tend to feel more driven to go hunt and fight and things like that. Not that I plan to spend my life barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, but when so much of our culture insistently ignores real life because it's contrary to one ideology or another, it was nice to see a value system/ideology/what-have-you that is actually BASED on reality, instead of trying to deny it.
14. I made a blanket pin out of copper. It started out as two pieces of copper wire, and look how it turned out! Ha!
List Number Two -- Things that were silly, a little obnoxious, straight up crazy, or otherwise less cool.
1. Hannah and I accidentally attended a moon lodge (we were told we were going to a discussion group). There was a fire, and a woman called Sangoma leading the circle and asking people to “bring things to the fire.” We sang songs (“I have the infinite eternal inside of me…!”) and people talked about their chakras, or about having too much empathetic energy, or about African traditions surrounding the moon goddess. Hannah and I wanted to be respectful, so we sat and nodded and held hands when asked. There were ten or twelve women there, and everyone was incredibly serious and sweet. After we “released the directions” by turning to face North, South, East and West and addressing the spirits (or something) of each direction, I walked away being really thankful that my faith is so much simpler than all the ritual and chant and ceremony and complicated collection of goddesses and spirits and energies that these women looked to for meaning. I can’t imagine going through every day feeling like it was up to me to piece together a spirituality for myself, or to tap into the spirit of whatever, or that if I didn’t do this cleansing ceremony or that healing ritual, I’d be trapped by thus and such negative energy. That’s the great thing about being Reformed though. No having to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, no earning anything, no brownie points with God. As the song goes, grace is an amazing thing.
2. The guy who led our “When the Shit Hits the Fan” class veered off at one point from talking about bug-out bags and strategic community building, to talking about the reptilian humanoids who are ruling the world. Basically, there are reptiles that shapeshift into humans who control everything. The Bilderberg Group? The Illuminati? All put in place by the reptiles. The reptiles came from another dimension, or from space (or both?) and they pull all the strings. You can wikipedia a guy named David Icke to get the full story. It’s basically insane. The wikipedia article suggests that the whole idea is perhaps “Swiftian satire.” I hope to god that’s true. We also learned that space is like an ocean with giant miles-long amoebas living in it that suck our energy. Before he could tell us about the space amoebas though, we had to imagine a white protective bubble around us. To keep out the space amoebas, obviously.
3. There was a lot of jargon at Firefly. I could go on about other kinds of jargon that drive me crazy, like the church jargon that says things like “The Lord placed it on my heart…” or uses the single word “walk” to mean “Christian faith, life and daily experience.,” or using “gift” as a verb, as in “God has gifted him with so many talents.” To be perfectly honest, the Church has a ton more awful jargon than the good hippie folk I met, but there were two terms I heard more than once that just made me go “Eh?” One was referring to a woman as a “female-bodied person,” which was odd to me because I heard it from the same people who were talking about women caring for babies while men went out to hunt. Can’t we just say ‘male’ and ‘female’? The other one that I heard a LOT was people referring to their husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, as their “partners.” Straight people with wedding rings on. If you have a wedding ring, I assume you have a husband or a wife. I don’t want to be someone’s ‘partner.’ That makes it sound like the person you’ve committed to spending your life with is on about the same level as the guy who owns the other half of your real estate business. This is why I totally understand why gay people aren’t satisfied with “civil unions.” You want a wife or a husband, not a partner. So I don’t understand why straight people, who CAN ACTUALLY GET MARRIED, would insist on using a lame, businessy term like “partner.” Is marriage just too mainstream?
4. Judgmental hippies. A lot of people seemed to have a constant need to insert into conversations or discussions the things they DON’T do. As in “Well, I don’t eat canned goods, but if I did I bet that would be tasty.” Or “We don’t have electricity, so we lit candles for the ceremony.” Or “I don’t shop at the grocery store, so I haven’t eaten cereal in a while.” There are some situations where, sure, that’s relevant. But mostly nobody else needs to know that you don’t eat canned goods. Just say “That sounds tasty” and leave out the not-so-subtle judgment.
5. This could go into the jargon category, perhaps, but there was only really one person I heard use these terms so I didn’t want to blanket the whole hippie community with the embarrassment that SHOULD come from making up words. “Shero” instead of “hero.” “Herstory” instead of “history.” Please, please please, just use the English words. I’m all for referring to humanity as “humankind” instead of “mankind,” and I appreciate when pastors say “sisters and brothers” instead of always “brothers and sisters,” but there comes a point when you just sound ridiculous. Please just use the language we already have. It works just fine, as is.
I totally want to go again next year.
14. I made a blanket pin out of copper. It started out as two pieces of copper wire, and look how it turned out! Ha!
List Number Two -- Things that were silly, a little obnoxious, straight up crazy, or otherwise less cool.
1. Hannah and I accidentally attended a moon lodge (we were told we were going to a discussion group). There was a fire, and a woman called Sangoma leading the circle and asking people to “bring things to the fire.” We sang songs (“I have the infinite eternal inside of me…!”) and people talked about their chakras, or about having too much empathetic energy, or about African traditions surrounding the moon goddess. Hannah and I wanted to be respectful, so we sat and nodded and held hands when asked. There were ten or twelve women there, and everyone was incredibly serious and sweet. After we “released the directions” by turning to face North, South, East and West and addressing the spirits (or something) of each direction, I walked away being really thankful that my faith is so much simpler than all the ritual and chant and ceremony and complicated collection of goddesses and spirits and energies that these women looked to for meaning. I can’t imagine going through every day feeling like it was up to me to piece together a spirituality for myself, or to tap into the spirit of whatever, or that if I didn’t do this cleansing ceremony or that healing ritual, I’d be trapped by thus and such negative energy. That’s the great thing about being Reformed though. No having to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, no earning anything, no brownie points with God. As the song goes, grace is an amazing thing.
2. The guy who led our “When the Shit Hits the Fan” class veered off at one point from talking about bug-out bags and strategic community building, to talking about the reptilian humanoids who are ruling the world. Basically, there are reptiles that shapeshift into humans who control everything. The Bilderberg Group? The Illuminati? All put in place by the reptiles. The reptiles came from another dimension, or from space (or both?) and they pull all the strings. You can wikipedia a guy named David Icke to get the full story. It’s basically insane. The wikipedia article suggests that the whole idea is perhaps “Swiftian satire.” I hope to god that’s true. We also learned that space is like an ocean with giant miles-long amoebas living in it that suck our energy. Before he could tell us about the space amoebas though, we had to imagine a white protective bubble around us. To keep out the space amoebas, obviously.
3. There was a lot of jargon at Firefly. I could go on about other kinds of jargon that drive me crazy, like the church jargon that says things like “The Lord placed it on my heart…” or uses the single word “walk” to mean “Christian faith, life and daily experience.,” or using “gift” as a verb, as in “God has gifted him with so many talents.” To be perfectly honest, the Church has a ton more awful jargon than the good hippie folk I met, but there were two terms I heard more than once that just made me go “Eh?” One was referring to a woman as a “female-bodied person,” which was odd to me because I heard it from the same people who were talking about women caring for babies while men went out to hunt. Can’t we just say ‘male’ and ‘female’? The other one that I heard a LOT was people referring to their husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, as their “partners.” Straight people with wedding rings on. If you have a wedding ring, I assume you have a husband or a wife. I don’t want to be someone’s ‘partner.’ That makes it sound like the person you’ve committed to spending your life with is on about the same level as the guy who owns the other half of your real estate business. This is why I totally understand why gay people aren’t satisfied with “civil unions.” You want a wife or a husband, not a partner. So I don’t understand why straight people, who CAN ACTUALLY GET MARRIED, would insist on using a lame, businessy term like “partner.” Is marriage just too mainstream?4. Judgmental hippies. A lot of people seemed to have a constant need to insert into conversations or discussions the things they DON’T do. As in “Well, I don’t eat canned goods, but if I did I bet that would be tasty.” Or “We don’t have electricity, so we lit candles for the ceremony.” Or “I don’t shop at the grocery store, so I haven’t eaten cereal in a while.” There are some situations where, sure, that’s relevant. But mostly nobody else needs to know that you don’t eat canned goods. Just say “That sounds tasty” and leave out the not-so-subtle judgment.
5. This could go into the jargon category, perhaps, but there was only really one person I heard use these terms so I didn’t want to blanket the whole hippie community with the embarrassment that SHOULD come from making up words. “Shero” instead of “hero.” “Herstory” instead of “history.” Please, please please, just use the English words. I’m all for referring to humanity as “humankind” instead of “mankind,” and I appreciate when pastors say “sisters and brothers” instead of always “brothers and sisters,” but there comes a point when you just sound ridiculous. Please just use the language we already have. It works just fine, as is.
I totally want to go again next year.
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