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The core aspect of The Skuld Project is the loss of and attempt to regain a connection with the natural/wild/essential world. Skuld has lost her deep connection with the wild, which in her mythical life involved shape shifting between human and animal states. Indeed to her, there is no difference as they/we are already in animal states. She remembers deeply within herself this element of her origins that that has left her. Throughout her existence she has been pushed further and further from her home lands to find a people that she can be amongst. People that believe that human and animal are one and live their lives around this essential knowledge. Now, in the present day those people have almost all gone. No one believes anymore and because she exists as an extension of all belief, she is lost. All are gone and she is in despair for it.
In many ways Skuld's quest and journey is my own. I feel that as a person living as a modern human I have lost my core connection, my 'at one-ness' with nature. By lost, for me, I mean I have lost it not in my own recollection but rather in what you might call an ancestral memory sort of way. It was there at one time in the group memory and now it is gone and has been so for many years. I feel this deeply and I spend much of my life trying to regain it. I live in the woods in New Brunswick in a very pristine setting. – Perhaps I should say aparently pristine. All around me is beautiful forest and meadow, but I don't have to walk too long before I am engulfed in clear cuts. – The music of the frogs at night and the birds in the morning are my constant companion. I have traveled by canoe, by foot, by horseback in many beautiful and wild areas, mostly in Canada but also in Ireland, Scotland and the north east USA. I teach myself to identify wild foods to eat. I traditionally brain/smoke tan my own hides and make clothing and other articles from them. I hope to take my first foray into hunting in the autumn of 2007. I have worked restoring birch bark canoes, umiaks and kayaks. I have spent weeks at at time living rough in the woods on my own and with others. In short, I love the wild places in the world.
In spite of this experience, which I would say is significant but not exceptional, or perhaps because of it, I can see the deep gulf that yet remains. Of course, I also would say that the learning and the discovering is the greatest part of it all and isn't life about going deeper anyway? Yes it is, and yet how wonderful must it have been to live in the times before agriculture, to walk into a forest you call home and see the land with those eyes, those ears and that touch. In Europe, those times might have been 10,000 years ago. In other parts of the world, massively diminished, those times are in the present or perhaps within living memory. I suppose that those wild human cultures are now almost all extinct and awareness of the loss is common curency. We all know that indigenous cultures are either gone or fighting for their existence. We have exterminated them as efficiently as we have exterminated much of the other living things around us. I read every day of massive loss of species. The creation of the 6th great extinction.
I feel that in some way what we need to learn as a human group is buried within these almost lost wild cultures and isn't it ironic that we are destroying the very medicine that we need so desperately.
I wonder about our focus on climate change and though I, of course, see the importance and the vital urgency of dealing with it, I also see the nastiest aspects of our world that spins around it. I believe that even if we manage to find a new non-polluting non-CO2-creating energy source, it will be more of the same. Increased efficiency fosters increased use as so eloquently pointed out by George Monbiot and others. Perhaps it's not more efficiency that's needed but more of less, more awareness, more respect, more honouring. I feel silly pointing this out as it has been discussed ad nauseum and more eloquently elsewhere. Are we consuming less. It doesn't seem so to me.
Perspectives on our place in the world may not change and they may well become worse ... isn't it great that we may soon have a clean fuel! Now we can build more roads, more cars, more planes. We can make ourselves even less connected to nature than we already are. The ellusive and much ballyhooed 'clean coal' ... we can now mine all the coal we want, we can destroy more watersheds in China, decapitate more mountains in Kentucky. Because our perspectives are created by us I wonder if we can create it to be different than what we are mired within. I also can see that using our ability to create is also a dangerous pit. Obviously, I'm not talking about technological fixes here.
At one point, at the beginning of a 3 month musical tour of Canada that I did a few years ago, I stopped by the French River in Ontario – as I often do to do a little homage paying – and made a pledge to commit the rest of my life and work to speak about the wild and how lost we will be (are?) without it. Hell, it was Henry David Thoreau more than 100 years ago who said, "In wildness is the preservation of the world". Ironies of ironies I also drove 16,000 km on that tour, living in my car, camping, performing. Well, I still feel sheepish and massively hypocritical about the amount of gas I used for those 3 months. But here I am in New Brunswick planning a new tour but now by horseback. I wonder if I'll travel the same distance in the end. It will not surprise me if I do and I know that I will be happy to not being a 'slave' to the petrochemical industry knowing that my so called carbon footprint will be minimal even taking horse (and my own) farts into consideration.
In darker moments I can see little hope and have little faith in my fellow human people. I often feel ashamed to be a part of what we have created (and here I mean the western world that I live in. I cannot really speak here for other places of the world, much as I might want to). It is in these moments of despair I feel that we all deserve everything that gets thrown at us. I see peoples' mindless quest for the comfortable and I feel contempt. Lust for comfort suffocates the soul, Bjork sings in her song Wanderlust. So it does.
I feel that I have had enough of it all. I no longer have a car and believe that I am sticking to the 'man' by ditching it ... some people would say that I am sticking to myself! I can honestly say that I feel a great freedom from the loss of my vehicle and I am riding my bike the 18km or so to town when I need to. I know what all the Canadians are thinking here ... Well, it's the first of June now and I'll deal with winter when I get there. Nearby in St. John they are going to build another oil refinery. I'm thinking that the worst place one will want to be around in the near future is anything and anywhere to do with oil. Northern Alberta is already a blossoming nightmare that we read and hear about in the news and I imagine it will only get worse. I have heard that the oil sands will have a land impact on the scale of the 3 Gorges Dam in China. This is horrific to me. Where will there be to go? I know of at least one person. Well actually, I know a person who knows a person who has had a vision of war happening in Alberta somewhere down the line. No doubt connected to oil, as is the fashion these days it would appear. Well, that really pisses me off because I love Alberta and I'm looking forward riding the wild open foothills, prairies and mountains when I get there in a few years time!
So. What do I do? Well, as I mentioned I got rid of the car and I am happy for it. I walk barefoot or in moccassins most of the time. I feel the earth beneath me and try to learn from it. I listen to the birds and the wind and try to learn from it. I smell the air as it winds its way through the balsam fir and try to learn from it. I try to teach mysef wild foods to eat and learn what they have to say. I make instruments and attempt to learn the music within them rather than impose my own biases. I see moose and bear tracks and try to learn to walk from it. And I spend time with loved ones near and far when I can and try to grow from it. What else can I do? As my friend Jabette, said to me whilst talking about impending fan shit hitting ... "today, it's a beautiful world" ... and I reckon that that's as good a place as any to start. |
