thinking about cave paintings that precede all recorded history by 25,000 plus years. how all of the written history we know is only around 5,000 years old. thinking about how they were here first. how they lived, and gathered together, and were one with their environment, far far longer than we ever have been entrapped in our broken world. thinking about the fact that they were as intelligent as we are, but immersed in different circumstances. clearly they were more intelligent than we are when it came to survival, plant identification, passing on oral tradition and knowledge, community cohesion. they lived and moved with their environment rather than attempting to cement a mutable, shifting world. they were more aligned to the parts of them that made them human. i wish we could be more like them.
we struggle so much with change, the natural wax and wane of life and its cycles, because change is not accepted in our modern society. the need to shift, change course, migrate, adapt are central to the very nature of our species, yet we live in unnatural centuries old systems that have been cemented onto our ways of being and thinking. they systematically destroyed the last of the large communities living the way the ancients did. we moved away from a human race that memorized information about the environment and actually lived in accordance with it. knowledge of the animals and their patterns, how to preserve food, the flora and fauna, what is edible, toxic, medicinal, what works and what doesn’t— is wisdom neglected and cast out. all of the things that gave us genuine authority and power over our lives and connection to our actual human nature was stripped from us over time, and systematically.
