minds, our very spirits—must reverse the self-domesticating flow that our civilized ways, domesticating religions and gluttonous consumerist practices have set in motion. There is no shortage of challenges to such a charge. Indigenous people who are trying with all that they have, in this moment, to remain in close communion with creation and to practice an undomesticated land-based spirituality and lifeway, are being assaulted from all sides. Many in this country are being violently relocated away from the land that they belong to as we speak. Beyond the fact that they’re being forcefully relocated so an elite few can make money, I see this attempt to separate people from their land as a deeper move to sever some powerful connection with the spirit that those humans have not lost, a connection that, as proponents of civilization know and deeply fear, could explode the beast, belly first. Derrick Jensen is fond of saying, “Dismantle globally, renew locally.” I assume that he is talking about dismantling infrastructure and technology and renewing bio-regions. But how do we first dismantle the civilization within us and renew or re-wild our minds? I want to be cognizant of the cyclical nature of dismantling and renewing. While I think that there is certainly value in Jensen's slogan, how do we ensure that if we are dismantling, we have something within ourselves that has already been renewed or re-wilded? Something like a mind, a spirit, senses.... This is imperative if those of us trying to practice an undomesticated spirituality are to materialize the liberatory, already-but-not-yet world/ kingdom/lifeway that we hold in our hearts and minds after this civilization implodes under its own weight, and ensure that we don’t simply reproduce domesticating systems, oppressive hierarchies and false binaries that for so long have deafened human animals to the spirit's urgings and the messages of non-human life. In other words: how, when this civilization crashes (like every other civilization before it), do we keep from building one more civilization on which to depend? Not to mention continuing the competitive, racist and misogynist socialization that has been being massaged into most of us since before our cognitive faculties were fully developed? How is this not a hopelessly impossible task? There is more nuance than I am setting out here—when civilization crashes it will probably not look like the blank slate presented in Hollywood movies or Cormac McCarthy novels. We might not even use the word crash for what happens. We might have to invent a whole new language for what happens. Or learn an old one. But I think that as people attempting to connect our minds, bodies and spirits in a struggle to recognize and resist the disease of civilization and to move toward total emancipation we can play a powerful and prophetic role in envisioning and actualizing what comes next. But to do this, we must begin to understand, to help each other understand, what it means to no longer conform to the pattern of this civilization and to re-wild our minds, to recognize what instincts remain intact within us and resurrect them, reclaim them for their intended purpose—to help us live on this earth as we were intended. I hope that we can practice this and that we can, therefore, practice hope.
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