ReWild

regenerating honest connection

My wife and I, along with our mentor, Jon Jondai, were invited to give a few talks and offer a handful of experiential workshops pertaining to regenerative culture this past weekend at a festival in Southern Thailand. My enthusiasm for such gatherings has waxed and waned over the last few decades, depending on myriad circumstances. When done right, festivals can offer a powerful opportunity for not only personal but collective transformation. When done wrong, these so-called “eco” festivals seem to do little more than offer a stage for a peculiar post-modern rendition of hedonism shrouded in various forms of cultural appropriation marketed as “transformative”. I am overjoyed to share that this particular festival aligned with the former.

A couple summers ago I wrote an article (read here: Wet Woman) that explored the importance of properly held festivals, of the responsibility hosts of such gatherings have to be vigilant about holding themselves accountable as to not turn everything into yet another party for the privileged. In that piece I critiqued what events like Burning Man have morphed into and highlighted my growing preference for small scale, communally organized gatherings that center around land, local culture, elders and the collective raising of children. Since then, I have noticed, happily so, that more of these grass-roots gatherings are beginning to surface globally with more frequency, in ways that to me seem to offer healthy glimpses into a world beyond the cultureless, corporate run insanity we now consider “normal”.

The ReWild Festival that took place this past weekend alongside a massive limestone cliff in Krabi, Thailand was essentially a pop-up village, a temporary reflection of a bygone time when it was obvious to all what was genuinely valuable. i.e. seeds, elders, wisdom, young people, culture, water, soil and the like. There was no plastic, no corporately sponsored anything, just a celebration of hard-earned insights pertaining to how to keep alive ways of being that benefit us all far more than merely the selfish modern pursuits of the individual.

Unlike other festivals I have attended, ReWild seemed to have more local high school kids and their families in attendance than 30-something ex-pats adorned in sexy festival attire. Please don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that there is anything inherently “wrong” with being performative and sexy at such events, and to be sure, teenagers in particular need well-initiated adults able to properly set aside spaces specifically designed for them to showcase their magnificence, but we should be mature enough to consider the implications of hosting a big party on an “exotic” shore somewhere that caters primarily to middle-aged, privileged western “influencers” seeking yet another “transformation”. There should be no surprise that in such cases few locals can be found beyond the token indigenous guests selected to open the event with a prayer, and/or cater food for the rock stars.

At Rewild, no world renowned musicians dominated an overly hyped stage ensconced by subwoofers and mock-tribal theatrics. Instead, the local culture was front in center, on there own terms. Local children offered traditional dances and various musical offerings. members of the Chao Ley tribe, a sea-faring nomadic people also known as sea gypsies, who have relatively recently rooted down locally shared their music and generously interpreted for us their ancient lineage that traced all the way back to Persia. So too was the classic sounds of Molam and Luktung offered, the hypnotic storytelling of the Northeastern regions of Thailand, bordering Laos. It was a feast of cultural sound, story and living history, come to life in a good way.

Winding through the forested area of the festival grounds could be found a diverse array of vendors selling everything from hand-spun clothes to hand-made coconut ice cream. It resembled what it must have looked like along the shores of Ayutthaya back in the fabled Silk Road days of old. Everyone seemed so dignified, not regulated to some sterile corner of an air-conditioned mall but shining brightly amongst a grand delegation of masterful artisans, musicians, chefs, travelers and magicians.

Like a pulsing fractal emerging spontaneously throughout various corridors of caves and palm trees, appropriate spaces for deep listening arose organically. Elders from various indigenous tribes shared wisdom with the younger generations, their struggles, their unique visions of hope. Seed keepers did the same, exchanging alternative takes on what modernity has taught us to invest in, reminding us of what matters most. Natural builders, basket weavers, herbalists and healers of all kinds offered hands on instruction as to how to live well in a place, how abundant and generous our planet, or shared home, our Mother Earth can be when we commit to living wisely, together, in Right Relation.

Education itself was probed heavily from many angles too. For if we are to bring into being again a culture that is capable of facing the challenges arising now we need to seriously begin having real talk about what education even is in times like these and what it is ultimately for. Is our ultimate goal merely to send rich people to Mars? Or would we rather see our children learn ways to be genuinely healthy and to learn how to solve conflict in ways that do not require war? Is it possible to teach peace? Is it possible to live in a world without iPhones again? Without plastic? Without, dare I say it…capitalism??? Could we teach children how to wisely consider these things? Could we teach them to view the Earth as alive and themselves a wild, fabulous extensions of Her? Can we learn how to teach children to respect not only kids that have different skin tones than they do but to respect other beings altogether? Like wolves and bodies of water? And arguably the biggest question of all, can we ourselves learn how to become mature adults again, worthy eventual elders dedicated to living well in communities strong enough to welcome home initiated youth? To be sure, education seems to require better questions than the ones generally being asked now.

Of course, being a festival, the nights featured the wild sounds of electronic beats. This is the preferred pulse of the age we now live in and to completely deny this is to deny the foundational laws of adaptation and change. But no alcohol was served and the music selected was a rich tapestry of world rhythms. Joining the DJ were masterful players of dun duns, djembes and didgeridoo, hang drums, and other various traditional Thai instruments of percussion, such as the taphon mon (ตะโพนมอญ), Klong thap (กลองทับ) and ranat ek (ระนาดเอกเหล็ก). Too often do we forget how much we as humans need dance! Such strong medicine indeed!

Increasingly, as a seed keeper, I am seeing how keeping alive the diverse ways of seeing what it means to be human in this increasingly monocultured time is just as important as keeping alive the actual seeds themselves. As such, for my session, we spent most of our time collectively sharing stories, ones that required us to bring again to life the nearly forgotten places in our memories that modernity has forced us to keep hidden. As we sat in the garden, surrounded by thousands of freshly sprouting tree saplings, the fragile offspring of long lines of proud, strong tree people, we marveled at how, after allowing ourselves the space and time to explore what we have for so long denied, genuine memories of our ancestral roots did eventually re-emerge! It is utterly fascinating to me how, when conditions are right, when we come together with genuine receptivity, real people of place, even after many years of cultural dormancy, like seeds hidden in clay jars stored far from the ruler in the walls of ancient adobe homes, can manage still to come alive again!

We need to begin doing what we can to co-create the right conditions for not only the organic regeneration of soil, which thankfully is becoming an increasingly common act, but so too the natural emergence of our ancestral wisdoms. Modernity has caused our psyches to be clouded in a thick plume of tech-obsessed amnesia. We have forgotten what matters most, and as such, even when our efforts are well intended, as is often the case with such efforts as the production of electric cars, Bitcoin, Burning Man and the like, we usually wind up but regurgitating the same fascist, colonizer B.S. that our kind hearts are so desperately hoping to escape from. Yet as we have learned so many bloody times before, empire cannot be conquered using the same tools that made it in the first place. Rather, a more ancient, more gentle and far more creative song must be sung, one that is born of community and resonates via the echoes of a previous time coming alive again now, in a new way.

For a brief moment I heard that song this past weekend. A greatly needed reminder that even in times as dark as these, seeds still carry within them secretly encoded blueprints for how to come alive again; How to be happy again. How to be simple and grandly complex. How to be respectful, courteous and genuine. How to be hopeful and not lazy. How to be determined but patient. How to live well in a place, collectively, with all beings. How to remain dedicated to a vision of offering necessary conditions for continued renewal to a people and time we here now will likely not live to see.

I tip my hat to the good people who put ReWild together. I walk back into my own community with renewed hope and a big motivation…. to live a small, grand existence.

#maypeaceprevailonearth