It Begins in Fire

Enjoy Life Unschooling is hosting it's first blog canival, with the topic of New Beginnings, and when I read the list of prompts for writing a New Beginnings themed post, one of them stood out to me:

How do you celebrate new beginnings in your life?

When I was a child, I loved mythology.  All mythology.  Anything I could get my hands on.  Once, I read a novel about an Indian dancer, and in it the main character worshiped the god Shiva, who is both destroyer and creator, benign and terrible.  Shiva is also often associated with fire.  In the book, I remember reading about Shiva, the god of fire and dance, who dances the destruction of the world, then dances it's rebirth.

That must have made an impact on me, since the memory of it has stuck with me for years.

To me, fire is like that: the creator and destroyer.  Bringer of endings and beginnings.

I like to have ritual in my life.  It makes me feel calmer, more grounded.  It's a way of both connecting with the wider web of life and of centering myself.  When I forget to mark passages, and changes, and holidays, and the turning of the season through ritual, it saddens me, and even makes me feel a bit lost!  It's something that I forget about too often, but that adds greatly to my life.

Fire has always felt sacred to me.  Anyone who's ever stared into the flames knows how you can fall almost into a trance while doing so, how fascinating and exciting it is, the warmth and light of it.  Fire is both comforting and dangerous.  So it's not surprising, I suppose, that fire plays an important part in ritual, for me.

And what I want to talk about now is endings, and beginnings.  Because the two are inextricably intertwined!

A few years ago, instead of just making resolutions at New Years that I won't keep anyway, and will just feel bad about when I break, I wrote down, on a blank sheet of paper, all the things I wished for in the new year.  New friends.  Good health.  Discovering new places.  And I went downstairs, along with my family who'd chosen to do the same thing, and in the dark-warm-stillness of past midnight, we placed our papers in the wood stove and watched then curl as they burned brightly, the smoke carrying our wishes up the chimney and out into the night.

I've also used fire to symbolically cleanse bad things from my life.  To burn bad memories and feelings, release them in a tangible way so that I can move on in my life more freely.  Regrets can weigh so heavily, make you wince, and want to just curl up in a dark corner and forget about it all.  I think that too many people carry heavy regrets with them long after they should have been put to rest.  The past is past, and can't be changed.  You can never fully get rid of regrets, I know, but I'm constantly trying to lessen the burden of my regrets, and to realize that every moment is a new beginning, a time to do things differently, to move further toward what and who you want to be in this new moment.  

Fire is both endings and beginnings.  It's change.  It's wild and warm and life giving and life taking.  It's spontaneity and it's meditation.

And it helps me to remember that life is moving, not static, and to mark those passages, those changes, those new beginnings.

Peace,
Idzie

Green Anarchy

If I wait until I feel ready to explain green anarchy in my own words, I will never write that post.  So I decided, instead, to give you the link to a great introductory article on the subject, and to comment a bit on specific parts of that article.

Before going into that, I'm going to say this: I'm not looking to start debates, and as I've mentioned previously, I find posting highly politicized posts to be nerve wracking.  I've decided to keep the comments on this post open for now (depending on the nature of the comments, I *may* choose to close commenting at a later date.  I don't think I will, and I don't want to, but I also want to keep that option open in case I find the feedback I'm getting is stressing me too much!  Yeah, I know, I'm overly sensitive.), but I ask that you please refrain from attempting to start any big political debates!  I feel a need to add a bit extra to this anti-debating thing, that I feel in my last couple of posts I didn't address as much as I should have.  I have no problems having my opinions questioned.  I do have a problem with my opinions being questioned in a confrontational, adversarial, disrespectful, way.  I love talking in person about my views with people whom I know to be open-minded and respectful, and the person I spend the most time having in-depth conversations with is my sister.  She's a more analytical thinker than I am, and we complement each other wonderfully in discussions.  She'll often point out things I may not have seen, or tell me when something I say doesn't seem thought through very thoroughly.  I don't, however, like having those conversations online, where it's often hard to tell how the other person feels.  But I seriously digress.

There's a lot of information to be found on green anarchy online, but almost none of it is information for "beginners", just for those who already have a basic understanding of green anarchist philosophies.  So I was very happy to find this article, from Green Anarchy magazine, called An Introduction to Anti-Civilization Anarchist Thought and Practice.  I warn you, it is quite long, but it's also a wonderful introduction to the types of things that most green anarchists question and think about.

This article covers many different things, including the all important thing, when talking about being anti-civilization, of What Is Civilization?:

"Green anarchists tend to view civilization as the logic, institutions, and physical apparatus of domestication, control, and domination. While different individuals and groups prioritize distinct aspects of civilization (i.e. primitivists typically focus on the question of origins, feminists primarily focus on the roots and manifestations of patriarchy, and insurrectionary anarchists mainly focus on the destruction of contemporary institutions of control), most green anarchists agree that it is the underlying problem or root of oppression, and it needs to be dismantled."

And in the section Biocentrism vs. Anthropocentrism, it talks about one of the things I consider to be my core values:

"Biocentrism is a perspective that centers and connects us to the earth and the complex web of life, while anthropocentrism, the dominant world view of western culture, places our primary focus on human society, to the exclusion of the rest of life. A biocentric view does not reject human society, but does move it out of the status of superiority and puts it into balance with all other life forces. It places a priority on a bioregional outlook, one that is deeply connected to the plants, animals, insects, climate, geographic features, and spirit of the place we inhabit. There is no split between ourselves and our environment, so there can be no objectification or otherness to life. Where separation and objectification are at the base of our ability to dominate and control, interconnectedness is a prerequisite for deep nurturing, care, and understanding. Green anarchy strives to move beyond human-centered ideas and decisions into a humble respect for all life and the dynamics of the ecosystems that sustain us."

In Division of Labour and Specialization, another important point is brought up, that of how disconnected we are from the mechanics of our own well-being:

"The disconnecting of the ability to care for ourselves and provide for our own needs is a technique of separation and disempowerment perpetuated by civilization. We are more useful to the system, and less useful to ourselves, if we are alienated from our own desires and each other through division of labor and specialization. We are no longer able to go out into the world and provide for ourselves and our loved ones the necessary nourishment and provisions for survival. Instead, we are forced into the production/consumption commodity system to which we are always indebted."

It also talks about decentralization, something I think is incredibly important. From Against Mass Society:

"We reject mass society for practical and philosophical reasons. First, we reject the inherent representation necessary for the functioning of situations outside of the realm of direct experience (completely decentralized modes of existence). We do not wish to run society, or organize a different society, we want a completely different frame of reference. We want a world where each group is autonomous and decides on its own terms how to live, with all interactions based on affinity, free and open, and non-coercive. We want a life which we live, not one which is run."

Of course, as the author even says in Influences and Solidarity, many green anarchists come to different conclusions on various points from those of the author:

"It is also important to remember that, while many green anarchists draw influence from similar sources, green anarchy is something very personal to each who identify or connect with these ideas and actions."

However, I definitely think that this is a very good introduction!

I hope that if you're interested in truly learning about green anarchy, you choose to read the entire article, not just the bits I've included in this post, because those bits really only give you a part of the whole story (hell, they just give you part of the whole story, taken from an article that is itself just a small part of the whole story!).  And I hope that it gives you a better understanding of where I'm coming from, as well!

How I ended up considering myself a green anarchist was actually by process of elimination: anything that didn't jive with my core values, I just didn't agree with.  I had no faith in politicians or governments, and had been interested in anarchy, in a very vague sense, for years.  However, I just always believed everyone around me when they said that it was a load of crap, and so I didn't look into it myself for a while...  But when I did, I sure liked it!!  However, with most anarchist philosophies, I saw a major flaw: they were concerned entirely with humans and with human society, and didn't really seem to consider the environment or the greater web of life.  So when I found green anarchy, it just felt right.  Here was something that finally made sense to me!

I also hope that by reading that article, it'll cause you to think about and question some things that you may never have thought of before...

For a currently small but ever growing resource list of interesting stuff on green anarchy and post-leftist anarchy, go to the bottom of my Links and Resources page!

Peace,
Idzie

Core Values

This is a bit of a follow-up to my previous post, Debating and Discussing.

Many people feel that, because of my age, mainly, my "radical" ideas will likely change (after all, all anarchists are young, right?? *Snorts*). I find this view rather offensive, but I'm not going to go into it now. Many changes happen over time, and I can't know what I'll look like or think like or who I'll be in the future. But I can know that some things are far more integral and essential to me, and have, since I was much younger, been essential to my Being, and those things I think are FAR less likely to change than anything else.

I have a few unshakable values, things that can’t be affected by others opinions, by arguments, by new findings. Things that aren’t up for questioning in my mind, and that I don’t think *can* be “objectively proved”. Things that are rooted firmly in the core of my being, and which without their existence, I would be an entirely different person.

One is the absolute belief that ALL life has inherent value, not just human life, and that the status of “person” does not belong solely to humans (or even solely to other animals). This is what everything else I believe in, support, and live is based on. That the Earth is Alive, that all it’s inhabitants are People, and that the Earth should be respected and revered.

Secondly, I believe humans to be capable of living as free beings (and to deserve the right to live as such): I do not believe that humans “need” to be controlled by others. I believe each human has the inherent ability to lead their own lives and make their own decisions.

All my other opinions and views are just window dressings, really.  They have changed, will quite likely change, and are in a perpetual state of changing, as I think on things and talk to people and read new books and have new experiences…  All my other views are simply those that, with my current experience, most closely line up with my core values.

And those core values, well, I’m pretty damn sure those are here to stay.

Peace,
Idzie

A (very) little bit about animism

I haven't really talked about my spiritual beliefs in this blog before, although I've certainly mentioned (and state at the top of my blog) that I'm an animist. So, when I stumbled upon this post on the blog The Center For Bioregional Animism, I wanted to share this definition of animism, which I find to be very accurate.

"The most common definition of animism is the belief of spirits inhabiting animals, plants, and inanimate objects. However, this is an over simplification based upon western-colonial concepts. Animism is being re-evaluated by many in the fields of comparative religion and anthropology. A new understanding is surfacing. In the writings of Graham Harvey, he explains that animism is not the projection of human qualities upon objects. He argues that these old ideas are outdated. On the contrary, animism is an absence of the idea that humans are superior and/or separate from the living world. Animism relates to the world as a community of people, only some of whom are human. By relinquishing our dominion over the rights and consideration of person-hood, the world is no longer a collection of resources for consumption, but is seen as a delicate web of relationships."

Peace,
Idzie