The Feral Weeds of Civilization

http://www.feraljesus.com/calvin-and-hobbes/

There is no longer anything wild and free over the next hill. All you will find are filthy cities, factories, outlet malls, military bases, judicial centers. Remove your gaze from this monstrosity, and look toward the earth. Observe and learn from the flowering weed that cracks the pavement, so full of power, hopeful energy, creating beauty amid the desolation. Aren’t you a sweet, free spirit, a flowering weed that breaks through the asphalt, a serendipitous encounter who makes life bearable? Keep breaking out of the darkness of civilization. Thrust, reach up, display your beauty and freedom in ecstasy. Expand and expire for all to see, until you are crushed.

I feel my heart breaking and aching and resisting as I pull back from so much in life and take the time and space to heal and rebuild.  Painful.  Necessary.  And, after ten years intensively exploring anarcha-feminist lifeways within the confines of a consummate patriarchy, inevitable.  Each day I feel pieces of me fall away as i peel back the broken layers and rest what remains of my naked, raw self on a more solid foundation.  I look forward to our intersecting fates, my fellow feral weeds, as we continue to question and break from our pathological allegiance to an addictive society and its magnificent bribes.

Onward…What does it mean to leave an empire that has expanded everywhere?  In some ways, I think it makes the process more coherent, because the global expansion of empire has destroyed the illusion that we can simply pack up and ship out to a new place without recreating empire there as well. We must abolish and destroy the empire within us as well as the external forces of coercive control.