Nature is the centre of the mandala

In the city, I feel guilty for not being productive.  I feel guilty for turning off my cellphone and neglecting my urban responsibilities.

Surplus: Terrorised Into Being Consumers (2003) by Erik Gandini of Sweden.  It compares the human relationship to consumption in the US, Cuba, Sweden and India.  It interviews John Zerzan about his suggested method for changing the prevailing paradigm.  It is skeptical, musical and pragmatic.

John Zerzan in 1997: "This time the bohemian schiz-fluxers, green yuppies, hobbyist anarcho-journalists, condescending organizers of the poor, hip nihilo-aesthetes and all the other "anarchists" who thought their pretentious pastimes would go on unchallenged indefinitely - well, it's time to pick which side you're on. It may be that here also is a rubicon from which there will be no turning back."

This film makes a lot of sense if you watch parts one through ten in order, but it makes another kind of sense if you play all ten parts at once and listen to the civilised noise we wake up to each morning and pay attention to what happens when each clip, of variable lengths, cease and leave us with a silence of infinite possibility.

John Zerzan proposes destruction of property.  He suggests we rip up the highways and grow food on the land instead.  I personally would like to watch our highways slowly crumble and rot back into the earth at their own pace.  In the meantime we can continue to take advantage of our environment and what it has to offer us without another moment of destruction.  We can live in and tangibly come to terms with what we have created, finally take a moment - the rest of our life - to accept and process emotionally, intellectually and socially the meaning of the structures we have built around ourselves while we watch nature slowly reclaiming them.