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"Dreaming is a religious rite."

Welcome to #TNL № 6. This season we’re contrasting Western temporalities with Aboriginal wisdom. Featuring analysis, imagery and narratives on decolonization, feminist advocacy, and reclaiming ancestral narratives.

Spring 2025.

14 pages.

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#natureandspirituality #indigenoushistories #zine #ancienthistory #lifeways

"To be a white man all you have to be concerned about is money and possessions and the pleasures -- what he terms pleasures of life. What he doesn't realize is that herein lies the pleasure: the life that surrounds us. These green things which are our relatives, this grass, the things that grow, all livings things which are our relatives. But the white man sees that he has to manipulate and exploit all these things so that he can have pleasure. Self-pleasure: it's complete selfishness. And so, this is what that old man meant when he said the hardest thing today is to be an Indian. It's so easy to go out and get a job and be concerned only with money. And then, you start building fences around your house. You start building fences around your cities, you start building fences around your states, start building fences around your country, and all this time you're only building fences around yourself."

-- Russell Means, on spiritual survival, Wounded Knee, 1973

The image of building fences strikes a chord with me, as I see in my own life a desire to close in, as I feel hemmed in by the logic of capital and the lifeways that are available to me: to serve accumulation or to be on the sideline and live meagerly in the cities. I am writing many years after Russell Means delivered these lines, and the fences have been here all those years and have multiplied. I struggle to find a way into community, and to find experiences of reverence. Maybe it is not universal, because I have ailing health and can hardly feel pleasure of any kind most days, but insofar as I know my own experience I know that I have been alienated from the world for much of my time as a part of it.

The grandness of the natural world, with its plants, animals, and millennia-shaped landscapes, is remote to me most days, until I look up to see the striking hills that surround the city where I live, and feel some awe at the time that has shaped them. I don't vie for a world of cyberpunk techno-dystopia, with its megacities and endless sprawls of concrete and metal and glass. I hope instead to find solace and belonging in communing with other people and by reaching out into nature.

The plant life that does permeate the city is planned and is non-native. The trees and shrubs and flowers are placed for visual appeal, rather than for homeostasis and sustainability. This disrupts the natural lifeways of the area, and creates a world in man's image rather than as it occurs naturally.

Though the city is not totally fenced in, the delineation of property lines is, and it sends the strong message that one does not belong naturally in this place, but must ask permission to exist there from an arbitrary lord. As well, there is a virtual fence in place in the way the police patrol the area: what energy one does have to explore is curtailed by random checks by the law, whether in car or by foot, that casts a shadow over the otherwise innocent attempts to reach out further (I have been stopped on foot to have my name run, for no crime other than walking a great distance). What chances there are to be with nature exist between shifts at jobs that themselves feel alienated, so the greater proportion of people's attention is focused on servile tasks and grueling repetition.

I struck out as a hitchhiking backpacker for a few years, and I discovered natural wonders between the cities that brought me a deep feeling of security and peace. Valleys, mountains, caves, rivers, oceans -- each with a grandness that suggests the lowly ambitions of financial wealth are hardly to be sought at all. Yet, to subsist in the longer term, it has remained for me necessary to huddle close to the centers of distribution and be given what industry considers marketable produce, marketable meals, and shelter someone with little money deserves to have.

I feel sometimes that the greater force of capital society would rather have me dead, since I am not a productive person to capital interests. I cannot fathom death, and I do not desire it, yet I feel so hopeless at times as I languish starving and malnourished on what food I'm able to get, and what exercise I can muster myself to do in an environment dominated by cars, by active addictions in the street, and by a populace seemingly largely not present to the moment. Those who do stop to linger are usually smoking weed or a cigarette, which is fine I suppose, but is still removed from the direct awareness of the moment.

Something in me, probably the part that has listened to too much Terence McKenna, longs for an ancient life that is on the land and connected to the logic of nature, instead of the profits of business. Another part of me wants to lean into the distractions, and be a part of the great game of commodity production, but really, I am fooled by the glitz of the shiniest toys. A more realistic pursuit it to gather the courage to make myself more dignified meals, to meet my neighbors, and to make the best of the extant infrastructure and architecture to have an enjoyable life. I would join agriculture, as well, and organically grow vegetable and fruit and tend to animals in sustainable and humane ways.

The reserve and authority with which Russell Means speaks, and the direct points he makes, bring the legitimacy of the postindustrial order into question. What he points out is simple: we humans are like the rest of life here, and connected to it, but the desire of industrial man severs that connects and under the guise of greater protection merely serves to isolate individuals from the wider world and from each other. We can hope for a restoration of lost lifeways and a great respect for nature, and we can hope for ways of living that are enriching and satisfying without the need of over-technologized ornament or the destruction of the natural world and the inherent dignity of humankind and all life.

#quote #quotes #lifeways #observations #writing #text post #markqet #markqet.design

#podcast #Ireland #lifeways #language #Irish language #folklore #Irish food #Spotify

#lifeway #lifewaysuccess #lifewayvoices #lifewaystores #lifeways #lifewayyouth #awakening #awake #awaken #awakethesoul #awakespiritual #spiritualawakening #awakethelight #awakenings #awakenedmind #awakeningbody #awakener #awakenlove #awakeningsoul #awakendreamers #higherawakening #awakenmylove #theforceawakens #awakenthedrive #awakeningcode #awakeningoflife #awakenyoursenses #awakenedminds #friday #classygentlemenway . . . . . 👉@classy_gentlemen_way || @classy_gentlemen_way 👑 https://www.instagram.com/p/B_Vg1ZIHRqj/?igshid=7jwt3dvxsaqb

The #ArtHop2018 festivities are a wrap, but a bit of the show still on display @takomacentral for a time. The weekend was full of amazing conversations and personal stories. It’s an interesting balance to talk about your artwork and simultaneously reveal the #islandresilience story behind it and how the worlds of #storytelling & #precovery and #resilience implementation are the goals for your foreseeable future work. - - Have a look at the pieces, proceeds from art sales go back into #gonethefishgonethechildrenfilm project in #Newfoundland. #islands #fisheries #sustainabletourism #lifeways #Marshallislands #Palau #Fiji (at Takoma Central)

#resilience #lifeways #marshallislands #fiji #islands #islandresilience #newfoundland #storytelling #gonethefishgonethechildrenfilm #fisheries #palau #precovery #sustainabletourism #arthop2018

WATER QUALITY🌱 of Interaction @LaNDCooperative @DaNCETReKkING @CANOPYTHREadS #INFILTRATION🌳🌲🌳 #LIFEWAYS Here In 🌊🌎

#lifeways #infiltration🌳🌲🌳

Im the birthday fairy at work...requirements: card making and snuggles! I also make get well and moving on cards. This frog is ready for her next journey 😊 (this is a real delegated work responsibility ha) #watercolor #illustration #card #handmade #frog #journey #work #earlychildhoodeducation #lifeways #responsibility