The horse is out of the barn. Ancestors, manifestos, etc.

I'm finally moving out!

(temporarily)

Mid-June it struck me that it was time to leave my high power, high paying job as a professional bottom wiper and walk the walk I had been talking. Over the past few years, I've had a growing interest in who my ancestors were (are?).  This has grown out of my exposure to indigenous peoples - let me explain:

Nowadays, we take it for granted that we can get what we want, when we want it.  Open the tap, and water flows.  Go to the store, and take food off the shelf.  Turn the phone on, turn the phone off - instant access or privacy.  But for 99% of the time humans have lived on the earth, this wasn't the case - we didn't have the technology with which to control our environment.  Peoples' lives were completely interwoven with their surroundings.  Especially for 'original' peoples (those with indigenous roots), their lives were sustained through relationships of exchange, to a degree we probably can't comprehend.  In particular, it was the living and present spirit of a land that nourished and allowed a group of people to live on it.  As can be seen today in (remote) indigenous cultures, it is a bedrock of well developed relationships with everything that allows life to continue. This is the basis of true environmental sustainability. (More on this later...)

Just like a husband and wife, there is a specific relationship between a given people and the land they are indigenous to. A specific group had specific traditions that tied it to a specific land.  One way you can see this is in the constant 'churning' of people over the last few thousand years - for European peoples (like me), these traditions were lost with the growing reliance on technology.  So people keep moving because they can't find their actual, ancestral home.  Dumbasses.

Learning about these sort of relationships has drawn me into wondering, who were my ancestors?  Where did they call home?  Where are they indigenous to?  Can I find any vestiges of the relationships that originally gave them life?  So my plan is literally to go to the places they lived, sit down, and listen.  Is there anything still speaking?  Am I someone from that place?

So there it is - my raison d'être.