Living in houses

It's time to get back to the earth. Living in houses destroys us in more ways than we can comprehend.

For example?

Sleeping patterns. There is one reason why we don't go to sleep when it gets dark and wake up when it gets light. Houses (and electric light). One example.

Partying and live music is another good reason we don't go to sleep when it gets dark.

I guess if things were different we would party and perform live music during the day, or at night under the stars and especially the full moon and around the fire (rather than in houses).

They promote compulsive behavior. They disengage us from reality; earth, air, water, sun, other plants and animals. They separate us from our neighbors and even our friends. In houses we sleep in different rooms and different beds; when we sleep on the earth we naturally sleep together, if only to keep each other warm.

Agreed Chris, I am completely off balance after coming back from Mexico, main reason being where I'm living.

If you clean up your house sufficiently, you will be vacuuming the floor until you are back on a healthy living soil and you will be dusting the roof and walls until they no longer protect you from reality and the air flows and the sky is visible in all its beauty.

I am a fat slob.  I live in a house.  I may not be actually fat, but I feel like I am.  When I eat a big meal I look at my stomach, it juts out rudely.  After eating a big meal, I feel like eating.  While eating I feel like I should be doing something, like reading or watching TV.  I want my food to be cooked and heavy with carbohydrates, specifically crude grains; fried rice, tortillas, bread or pasta.  I eat because there is nothing else to do.  I eat because I can't relax.  I eat because my environment is entirely uninspiring.  I create my own space, I cover the walls with beauty, I keep it clean and I fill it with comfortable furniture and meaningful objects.  I enclose myself in this space, surrounded by these objects, alone.  Here I am able to create a fantasy world, in my thoughts perhaps, or when asleep in my dreams.  At my best I create stories to reach out to the world from this space, but usually I don't have the energy.

I remember when I used to be alive.  I used to sleep on the beach.  I used to make fire before going to sleep at night.  I used to fall asleep looking at the stars.  I used to breathe fresh ocean air, cleaned by the salt.  I used to run naked up the beach when it was empty and leap into the water with exuberance and submission.  The ocean would always deposit me back on the sand, safe and refreshed; reborn.  No matter how many hot chlorinated showers I enjoy I cannot recreate this type of cleanliness.  No matter how many times I masturbate down the drain pipe I never have the feeling that I have entered the vagina of the Earth and been accepted.

I am a filthy smelly bum.  I sleep in the park.  I carry bags around with my everywhere I go.  I have everything I need on hand.  I sleep in the bush, surrounded by trees, cosy on a yoga mat in a sleeping bag, wrapped up in a woolen blanket.  When I wake up in the morning I eat my stolen breakfast on a picnic table in the sun.  I wash my hands and face and collect water from the public toilet.  I rarely shower.  Sometimes, when I am on a crowded bus or in a crowded cinema, I feel self-conscious about my smell or wonder if I have dirt on my face.  In the park this does not matter.  I love being in the city, I love to meet people and to have experiences and to expose my self to cinema and theatre and live music.  But public transport and shedules are so stressful in comparison to the world where the clock is the sun and the moon and the agenda is sitting on the earth and urinating on a tree.

When I am in a house I crave to be alone, to have my own room, to be able to close and maybe even lock the door.  When I am outside I love to sleep with everyone, in a row, to snuggle, to keep each other warm.  I look at the pigs I live with, sleeping in piles, and I envy them.  I sleep alone in a bed.  I sleep on the earth by the fire beside all my friends.  I sleep in a pile of humans in the bush. 

How safe is this world?

Late at night we all desire the warmth and comfort of dreams or love.  This seems to be a daily need.  We want nothing but to go somewhere we know we are safe, a place where we can become vulnerable enough to sleep or vulnerable enough to open ourselves up to another person.

And yet we spend so much of our time on the streets, where we do not feel safe.  What is the fear of spending a night on the streets?  That we can never allow ourselves to feel safe enough to be vulnerable enough to sleep.  We can sit down, we can rest, but we are not in dream, we are not in love.  We are guarded, we are clothed.  This is not satisfying because every day we must become naked, every day we must shed our protective barriers and reveal ourselves to a safe and contained section of the world; our bed or our partner.

We then ask ourselves why the streets are not safe.  Or rather, why do we perceive the streets as unsafe?  The streets are where the strangers come together and we have been taught to fear the stranger.  The streets are the inevitable realm of chaos in between our trips to the workplace, the school, the institutions of control and comfortable reassuring understanding.

We understand the social context of our institutions and we all play by the rules.  On the streets there are no rules.  We so fear the chaos of the streets that our politicians must create laws and hire gangs of intimidatory thugs to patrol the streets and enforce those laws which barely scratch the surface of restraining the chaos of the streets.

Life cannot be contained and even though we have created what we like to call civilisation and we participate primarily in consumption and production rather than the circle of life we are still living creatures and inevitably intertwined into life itself, despite our efforts to appear as robots or to behave as ants, busily selflessly serving our queen.

We are not like we talk about.  We are dynamic multi-dimensional creatures of infinite complexity and despite all these thoughts of fear that cloud our over-developed under-utilised brain we are living in a state of love and the streets are not actually dangerous after all and we all know that personally we prefer faith and trust and comfort to the ability to take advantage of some stranger by removing a few dollars from their sleeping pocket.

We don't want to walk through streets of fear and threat.  We think we must because we believe the news and the news tells us to be afraid of each other and this makes us confused rather than truly afraid because deep down we know that fear is boring and unnecessary and inappropriate.

Not so deep down, just below the surface thoughts of the incessant manic conscious mind, we realise that we have the ability to choose a place where we can sleep in vulnerability and dream of our most loved and know for sure throughout this restful night that even the possibility that our bag will be stolen is remote and even so the risk of losing the bag is insignificant in comparison to the value of knowing that we are safe in this world.  That we are in it together and that even when we have an unpleasant confrontational moment with another person we both carefully select and induce this experience from one another and perhaps we should appreciate each other afterwards.

However, culture is an organic living system and we decide every moment how it is going to manifest.  The limits of entropy as an explanation are limited in a world where millions of people are aware that their reality is their choice every minute of every day of their lives and that all their brothers and sisters are in on it too.

"You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends."
- Robert Anton Wilson