h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I stumbled across your page today, so thought I'd say hi.


I've read a couple of your articles/journal entries, and I'll be back to read more. It's good to see someone with a little spirit round here.


LSF

It's always welcome to hear that people are reading my stuff and maybe getting something out of it.

Your remedies seem very sensible, by the way. I even found your words to be very soothing.

I particularly liked the bit at the end of your 'Leviathon' article...

"So yes, I'm wild and proud of it. Feral human in the flesh. Look on my lives and tremble mighty Ramses. You can tame me maybe but you'll never domesticate me, lord of the domicile. Look on my beauty and despair. If only you really knew."

It reminded me of reading "Women who Run with the Wolves" , which is high praise indeed.

I've never read that Women thing. So I'll have to take your word for it and thank you for saying so.

I wonder if they got a book about women who run with coyotes because the wolves are little thinned out now?

Oh I loved "Women who run with the Wolves" - I found this link with some quotes from it, in case you were interested:
http://www.elexion.com/lakota/textos/texto31b.htm

Very interesting.

I especially liked her vision of dismembering the predator and putting him to your own use.

What she seems to miss in all those writings is the social life and responsibility of wolves. That's part of the wildness too, maybe one of the best things about the wildness that is lost on those moderns who dwell in urban jungles full of strangers.

We don't have to be alone. Our creativity is a social action, not merely a craving or individual desire. It should be cooperative with your mothers and sisters and, yes even your fathers and brothers.

Women build societies as they build nests or dens. These are things that can nurture the young and provide a mission for the elderly while sustaining everyone.

Women work too.

They shouldn't just run around blindly seeking gratification or release. Because if they don't do things, the things don't get done.

So what the men, when they act like boys, break, the women need to mend. It's maybe not fair but it's necessary so that the life of community persists. If she doesn't do it, who will?

Fortunately, as the mother, the woman can be the teacher of the boys as well as the girls, teach them to respect themselves and each other. Teach them to work hard for the people, so everyone can prosper. This teaching is like learning the language that gives the community its ties, its shared experiences.

Maybe that's not how it is in the urban jungle, but around the hearth, the campfire, that's how it should be and a good deal more.

I bet it has a lot to do with how you're raised too because it probably doesn't work in a neighborhood of strangers very well.

In that book of which we were speaking, I think that she does go into the social life of wolves (and the parallels that she then draws with the life of women), but I guess that those bits aren't quite so quotable for the website!


For me, the main problem of dwelling within 'the urban jungle' is the lack of community, the sense of tribe if you will. Everyone lives within spitting distance of each other, but no-one wants to reach out and make connections. Maybe this is the cause of many acts of violence in the city? The sense of isolation and being a stranger in a crowd can work funny mojo on the best of us at times.

It is my dream, no, my goal to live in a community that is supportive of each other. There is too much alienation from each other in these times and from what is really important in Life. I crave to be around those that share similar values, a return to simpler ways of living that is supportive to each individual and to the Earth, and I'm actively working towards this every day.

Maybe I'm just wearing rose-tinted glasses, but I feel that there *has* to be a better way to live than what is currently the norm here in the UK.

There is a better way and maybe you can recover it someday but, since Enclosure, it's a little harder right? Might take some ingenuity to adapt things to a society like the current, dominant one.