Ravirer A digital garden about disrupting status quo

burn the books, and other ways of relating

03 Aug 2022

Prior to that note, another one named green religion, planetary conciousness and decoloniality never saw the light of day. I started it at the end of February, but never followed up with it. But it’s fun to see today that the thoughts that live within me right now already started to take root last winter. So here’s the pieces of content I wanted to talk about back then, which truly blew my mind at the time, for posterity and anybody’s curisosity :

Back then, I wanted to connect those to two pieces of fiction : the good old Lost City of Atlantis, which was one of my favorite childhood movie and that I had just rewatched back then and also the book The Overstory by Richard Powers, which truly moved me. But hey, time’s missing so I’ll just leave it on that. BUT, I remember that one of the general feeling I was trying to vehiculate was my eternal ‘‘urgh universities are outdated’’ as I was gasping at all this international relations theory that were thought outside of the framework of nation borders, (see digital garden entry from mars 2021, problems bigger than states on the topic).

Otherwise, since then, summer came and therefore I was back into my urban agriculture worker routine. And this year, I’m still so much in awe in front of nature, but I’m trying to truly act on it, honour it. Therefore, I’m reading and consuming a lot of content on the topic, and also I’m trying to truly and concretely feed my herbalist praxis.

The book that probably awaken the most my thirst for a deeper connection with nature is Braiding Sweetgrass by botanist and indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer. Truly, this book is life changing. I’m not done reading it yet, but it really speaks to me.

In parallel, the podcast Green Dreamer never stops to amaze me and feed my soul deeply. I could name so many episodes, but the one that recently brought me tears of joy is Mia Birdong : Deepening our interdependence with community . In it, the guest suggest the provocating idea that ‘‘Freedom is community’’ and I am absolutly embracing this paradigm shift. It resonates so much with this quest around connecting with nature and others, trying to think ecologicaly about the world and us in it. Truly, I’ll ponder around this one for a long time.

Another podcast that I recently discovered, but that I am already passionate about is Medicine Stories. In this one, the last provocating quote I’ve heard is the following : “The more a culture is intact, the lesser cookbooks it produces.’’ (from the episode Confessions, Ancestral Foodways, Modern Matriarchy, & The Power of Radical Honesty - Katya Nova). For me, the question of culture, nature, health and community is so much linked to food. Like (cultural and traditional) food as been one of my obsessions of mine in the past 6 months and I love this phrasing, and everything that is being brought to light in this podcast. It’s very creative and inspiring. I can’t wait to think more deeply into all of that.

And this cookbook quote made me want to ‘‘burn books’’. On another topic, I’ve been questionning my study fields, wondering if I should pursue in litterature as planned or rather in plain communication. I then I reached the conclusion that stuff I said about myself when I was a kid isn’t true anymore. Like I realized that nowadays, my passion is not about writing but about communicating itself (hail Mercury). Also, reading is also not the passion : the passion is learning and being in awe (communion), no matter what is the medium. And that made me want to burn books.

Because for so long I told myself I had to write a book to be sucessful, that I was better at writing than talking, in a way that distanced myself from others, to feel more safe, to hide my vulnerabilities behind dead trees. But if community is freedom than books are bandaids, bridges at best.

In many of those media about herbalism and ancestral ways of living, there is this saying about having forgotten the langage of the world around us, be in the one of plants, animals or even our own inner voice or the own of our ancestors. Humans are the only specie who needs to read book to be able to thrive, it was also said in that last Medecine Stories podcast episode mentionned.

So yeah, I’m having a crisis of faith around writing and literature in general. But my craving of radical embodiment of this need for anchoring and building within a community gladly compensates that. Only the tools have to change, maybe. It wouldn’t be the first time I argue for that change of tools…

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