Realization: the more edible species a tribe knows and can harvest, the less area they need to harvest sustainable long term. More knowledge = more freedom.

Favorite summertime sound: intense crickets at night, in our cabin, warm, food, mom making hot chocolate or so. Or higher up, away, live music wafting up, dimmed by space, with someone I know, and want to know.

They also asked: What’s the best news that you could receive right now?
I know a group I think you’d like.

Third: What groups do you belong to?
Archetypes and animal spirit guides have felt relevant recently. Archetypes determining my life’s personality came from Energy Anatomy, and doing some work to identify mine (, best I have seen so far goes:

Most Sure one of my 12:
Alchemist
Student/Disciple/Scholar

Feel pretty sure one of my 12:
Prince
Lover

Feel likely one of my 12:
Coward/bully
Crook/thief
Companion/Sidekick
Artist

A few others look possible, plus whatever archetype has had me write things like this for many years.

In any case, she also says everyone has these four to go with their individual eight:
Victim
Saboteur
Prostitute
Child

Along similar lines, it struck me the animal spirit guide thing had more to do with animals I feel a rapport with than anything else (tentatively). So that wolf, sure there, but Crow/Raven, Horse, Spider, Turtle, I might also feel energy from, and have their “spirit” “guiding” me.

That says a bit which groups I belong to

So it struck me that here I have watched our original TV program. My brain went into a relatively dormant state, I sat and stated in one direction, digested dinner, talked with a family member until she left to do dishes.

Then I walked in to write that up and her TV needfully tries for my attention – something about buying a vowel. How hollow does that fabrication feel in comparison to real TV.

With these maps in mind, we encourage you to think outside the comfort zone and envision how you would fix dinner and with what… without going to the grocery store. Don’t let it overwhelm you. Be courageous and consider your family, not your fears.

I wonder, if you imagine your answer to that question what foods you see?

What weak spots do you see?

What areas of uncertain ability level have you not tested?

Have you tried it before?

How would this answer change if you also didn’t have a car?

Would you have any fun?

What if plan A failed, what would you eat for dinner?

Do you have enough calories?

If it persisted, what would you do then?

What do you imagine you wish you knew?

More to come!

Ah! Except that spices are plants. And plants occur in the wild. And thus spices occur in the wild. And following, I have written on three plants I have used as spices.

For spice number one, I started learning plants this June and keep seeing heart shaped leaves in the forest I haven’t identified. I suspect violets but since I started researching wild edibles too late this year to see violet flowers, don’t really know.

Wild Ginger

In the process I researched wild ginger. Wild ginger looks like violets but with three key differences: 1. it comes with only two stems per spot in the ground it pokes out of, whereas violet comes with other numbers of stems, 2. its stems feel hairy, violet’s do not, and 3. its horizontal root smells definitely like ginger.

Armed with that information I finally found some wild ginger two days ago. Growing along a trail 20 feet back from a river, I found a few patches of a dozen such plants from which I harvested a few.

I cut the root into slices and added to rice for a nice treat. It tastes like ginger at maybe ½ the strength.

Win.

Peppergrass

Easy to identify once you see a picture. Has a flavor like hot Chinese mustard.  Its leaves have much flavor, its seeds a bit less. I’ve tried adding it to like hot dogs but it tends to get overpowered. Apparently its leaves go well in salads, its seeds go well in soups. I actually like the stems too, though not mentioned in my Peterson edibles book.

Some peppergrass plants have more flavor than others. I haven’t found them in Pittsburgh area forested parks, but do find them fairly often in suburban areas. It can have pointy leaves or rounded leaves.

Tie.

Spicebush

Ah spicebush. Found everywhere in my area’s forested parks. You know you’ve got the plant when you break one of its distinctively spotted twigs and smell a spicy scent somewhat reminiscent of sassafras. Its dried and fresh stems, and fresh leaves work like bay leaf and also make a tasty tea. Its stems, when broken, substitute for a toothbrush. Its berries, when dried and crushed, substitute for allspice.

Only thing for me, I don’t like allspice. So I also don’t much like the berry spice, but heck, if you like allspice, once again the more-than-human-world can surprise you with its generosity.

Tie.

So there you have it. Just three of the spices from your neighborhood, not your grocery store. When you don’t have a grocery store anymore, you still have spices and only ill-informed folks will eat their deer meat plain, their stews plain, and their seed gruel plain. I’d like to have some indigenous stories to go along with these plants to help remember their properties and appearances. If we don’t recover any old ones, maybe new ones will appear out of so-called nowhere.

Earlier it had struck me if this world civilized economy has another depression, population has grown considerably since the last one so it may not look like a previous deep slowdown. In 1930, world population came out at 2 billion, so today’s population comes out at 3.5 times as large. Like most people listening to civilization’s mythology, until recently I tended to underestimate the effect of resource consumption rates when number of resource consumers has grown such a huge amount. What happens if a depression hits but when population has gone up 250% and resources have correspondingly inversely depleted? Can society hold itself together under those conditions? I no longer hold the optimism its future will be like its past, even in an age of “rapid progress[ion]“.

So that either at this point, with my having switched to ultra-ultra-bear status in January, as historically, optimistic holdouts throwing in the towel paradoxically indicates the bottom, civilization’s economy recovers and throws it in my face, or we have another recession in a row which forces depression which forces a tangible permanent decline in social complexity. And by that point I want to walk outside that society in my own self-sufficient society.

But this also shows how mind-blowingly much freedom the small tribe gives, and yet at the same time, how that freedom translates into enrichment for its members.

And speaking of enrichment, he struck me when he said, “The complete and elegant way in which the Pueblo way of life helped the earth, fed life itself, instead of mining or conquering surroundings, corroborated the belief I’d kept hidden from view: that spirit is everywhere in everything and humans are capable of being part of it; that there are even some humans who do so as tribes.” As a child I had this intuition of insanity in desruction vs. feeding of the earth and reading his line, it amazes me that “I get to do this!?”

Richness of culture potential in tribal life goes so far beyond what I imagined possible for me, and stirs a desire for it, I’d forgoten I still have.

Your survival comes in threes. Without food, you can last 3 weeks before you have a serious problem. You can last 3 days without water. Without heat you can last only 3 hours. Without air, only 3 minutes. And finally, you can’t last even 3 seconds without a positive, calm outlook.

Our presenting ranger, a middle-aged woman, mentioned earlier she’d brought up two Eagle Scouts and a daughter in civilian air corps. As she said this last 3, 3 seconds, her face took on a determined, strong look as if she reached into a strong, calm resource in herself. That look seemed possibly the inspiration for Ravenwing from The Wandering Ones post-collapse story-comic-strip, that story’s living source of experience, sanity and calmness. That inner source of wisdom seems within everyone.