Sunday 4 January 2015

sauntering . . .

. . . a post arrives through the magic of the internet . . . brainpickings quoting Thoreau and his take on walking purposelessly or sauntering. A great way to reconnect with Nature . . . wandering in wild places . . .

. . . he suggests the origin of the word is sans terre, a term for pilgrims and other footloose folks, who choose a life without permanent home, work or, in pre-industrial times, land . . . when French children saw them coming along, heading towards Santiago, Rome or Jerusalem, or just wandering, they would call out, "sans terre", landless . . .

. . . in a synchronicity another post, this time from Sacred Economics FB group, examines the early days of capitalism, the need to persuade the peasants to give up their rural idyll/idiocy and instead live in urban slums, slaving in factories, disconnected from the land. The persuasion was accompanied by new laws, passed by the new power, the capitalists, who ousted the aristocracy, more or less . . . in some countries chopping off their heads, in others taxing them punitively, forcing them into marriages with bourgeois families or to sell off their land.

If linear time (only one way to perceive time) spirals, then perhaps capitalism has served its purpose, to accelerate economic development, and is now decaying, still powerful, but stinking and ready to be replaced . . .

. . . some propose urban models - Jacques Fresco and the Venus Project . . . others are returning to the land, bringing new skills, new ideas . . . seeking self-sufficiency, avoiding the famines common in pre-industrial agrarian economies . . . and the idiocy . . . seeking also to return to Nature as co-creators of the New Earth . . .

. . . and maybe also a place for saunterers to rest a while, share their stories, inspire others to saunter too . . .

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