siin

siin, 5 months ago

@SpiritBearDreaming saved & definitely planning on trying this!

siin, 5 months ago

Fun fact I learned from the beekeepers: the color of the wax is mostly due to the location it's in in the hive. There is white (usually from the cappings at the top of the hive as far as I understand it), yellow, and different shades of brown-ish that come more from the middle & bottom of the hive, respectively. The scent of the beeswax comes from the amount of honey in it!

During the last candle-making workshop, different keepers brought in wax from their hives, and the way that the keepers clean the wax and where they harvested it from made a huge difference in the smell and coloring of the wax itself.

I might be becoming a bee nerd, even though I don't have my own hive yet.

siin, 5 months ago

@SpiritBearDreaming Oh wow, I have absolutely never heard of this, but I will definitely check it out. I would love to learn about a system of beekeeping that is on the one hand more holistic & mutual, and on the other it seems like there is potential here for other spiritual work to be done through the act of beekeeping? I'm fascinated, to say the least, and very grateful to you for sharing this here.

siin, 5 months ago

@nathanlovestrees This sounds wonderful. Enjoy your shared meal, and best of luck on your year walk with the little one (I know how that goes).

I'll have to check that book out, we could use a book on the solstice on our kiddo's shelf.

siin, 5 months ago

@nathanlovestrees Oh thank you so much for passing these along! Wonderful!

siin, 6 months ago

@Cat_LeFey No but I like the idea of using actual cleaning implements in magick. Is your broom witchery centered around cleansing & purification? Or am I getting stuck on the obvious?

siin, 6 months ago

@SpiritBearDreaming Thank you for sharing this wonderful bit of local knowledge!

It is quite interesting that y'all is coming in and "dominating" (so to speak) the local phrasing. I saw a huge uptake of the word "y'all" alongside the uptake of many other phrases/terms/words taken from AAVE (because while y'all is a distinctly southern word, it also comes from the working class lexicon and is most definitely a part of AAVE in more than just the southern US -- at least in my experience both in real life and on the internet, totally open to the fact that this might be a misread).

"Y'all" became a really widely used phrase specifically on Twitter but in other internet spaces as well, and I feel like perhaps its popularity is why it's taking over the local slang, whether or not people are moving in who are using that word, perhaps it's just more popular/accepted?

Who knows, this is a rambling bit of social dissection and is based off of my singular experience, so again, totally open to being wrong about all of this ;)

siin, 6 months ago

@khthoniaa right? Why can't your washing machine water or dishwasher water plumb into your toilet tank? What harm would there be in that? I guess the risk of a smell, if you don't use the bathroom for a few days and flush any particles out, but some engineer could find a solution for that I'm sure.

siin, 6 months ago

@Cat_LeFey Ahh yes, what a special space! The liminality, for me at least, is always enhanced by the lakes in general. Ship swallowing, freezing midwave, thrashing still ice storms, those lakes are endless portals, full of stories.

siin, 6 months ago

@iraantlers We hope so, too. We always figure things out ;) Community support is overwhelming and wonderfully appreciated. Thank you, dear friend.

siin, 6 months ago

@SpiritBearDreaming You bring up wonderful questions and make a wonderful point. I've said this, kind of, elsewhere in this thread, but I find these issues with nearly every self-confirming ideology that I find:

it's great in theory, but doesn't logically work when applied to scale or just generally this moment in time & human history.

I'm not exactly sure what all of the anti-civ/anti-tech anarchists out there are looking for. As I've mentioned, I think that most of them are either considering future after collapse, or are considering personal frameworks for life. Although, I do think that there probably are some folks out there who genuinely believe that on a global scale we would be better off if only we threw off the shackles of civilization... and then what?

I don't think that any single ideology works at the scale of 11 billion people (or even our current 7.4 billion, or even at the scale of the US population of 330 million, for that, or the scale of the Los Angeles basin's population of 14 million, for that matter). I think that's one of the things that makes finding meaningful solutions to these very complex global problems SO difficult. We all have somewhat different values, goals, beliefs, connections, experiences, perspectives, access needs, and so on. It might work for my partner & I to go off & live in tipis in the desert with a solar powered "online" hut that we use to access the internet once in a while, but to otherwise spend our days caring for animals & the land. But it would be foolish to assume that would work for everyone, or that from our current modern position we could get everyone to assemble themselves into small egalitarian groups and to not war with one another. You're absolutely right: there is no serious proposition that includes that result.

I do think, however, as @lannan mentions also in this thread, that it can be interesting or necessary to consider which ways we can distance ourselves from reliance on some of the institutional structures that we're reliant on today. Industrial agriculture, industrial pharma, corporatocratic governmental systems, and so on. Modern life has stripped us of sovereignty and control over our own lives and health in so many ways, and I think that it's valuable to consider how we could organize (on a community basis, where there is interest in this) systems that could replace these large institutions whilst still meeting some or most of the needs of the community. Ultimately, people are dying because of a lack of access, and because of a lack of sovereignty, and there seem to be small ways in which this harm can be combated, if we're willing to think outside of what we're taught about blindly trusting the institutions we live within.

siin, 6 months ago

@SpiritBearDreaming I also just want to quickly acknowledge what you mentioned about ancestral trauma, and ancestral work, and the question you posed of how we can possibly go beyond this kind of trauma and actually build something without the ghosts of the past (so to speak) influencing our choices, our behavior, and its outcome.

I don't think that we can, at scale. Again, I don't think that we could realistically propose going from our current modern state to some primitive utopia where we suddenly are transcending our socialization and all of the trauma and learned behaviors that come with that.

But personally, on an individual and potentially small community level? I think it's worth trying to unpack our trauma, to move past it, and to do the work of evaluating our choices, behaviors, conceptions, and so on. For whatever that's worth :)

siin, 6 months ago

@khthoniaa Thank you so much! I'm really pleased and grateful to be hearing everyone's unique perspectives and critiques. I feel like I've already learned so much from everyone's shared experience, and plan on really more deeply processing all that's been shared here to try to figure out how I feel about this framework in general.

I would love to see this theory expanded to include more of the most marginalized and vulnerable populations, and especially I'd love to see individuals doing the work of considering what aspects of civilization are necessary, and which we perhaps need to move away from our reliance on. I've mentioned this in a way elsewhere in the thread and probably will again, but community sovereignty is probably the number one way to ensure access and security for members of that community. If we control our food production, we're less vulnerable to the whims of despots at war, we're less vulnerable to being poisoned by corporations, we reduce our ecological footprint in some small way, and so on (and that's just one example). But this looks different for everyone, and should always consider the different and diverse access needs present in each of our own communities.

Thank you for this comment! I'm grateful for your time and energy in sharing your perspectives & joining in this discussion.

siin, 6 months ago

@Julian_Invictus You're right that I did not aptly respond to this part:

"Personally, I favor consolidating humanity rather than encouraging it to spread out. I believe that advanced urban environments can be designed to promote our well-being, and that these megapolises ought to be interconnected and interdependent. Food can be locally grown hydroponically in agriculture towers using automated systems powered by solar window panes and alternating subfloors of wind turbines at strategic altitudes. Meanwhile, other necessities like medicine and technology can be produced and managed through a global supply chain."

I guess in my mind mentioning that this kind of infrastructure still relies on economic & ecological exploitation fit, but it wasn't clearly communicated, so I'll get into it just a little bit!

These are all great ideas, by the way, and as I've said elsewhere and perhaps to you as well, I'm not interested in finding or enforcing a global solution, and I think that what you're proposing could be a step in the right direction should it be possible to organize people to cooperate.

Whilst I think that solar, wind turbines, and hydroponics are great technologies as a shoe in for fossil fuels and destructive agricultural techniques, they still rely on plastics, steel, and energy in order to build turbines, solar panels, plastic tubing, to pump in water, to light the crops, and so on.

Steel is reliant on fossil fuels, plastics reliant on laboratories and chemical companies and always necessarily causing of toxic waste products, wind and solar are often inefficient in environments where tall buildings block light or wind, and the scale necessary for hydroponics to feed millions or more people in small areas would be tantamount to probably warehouses or other large facilities being necessary to grow such crops.

Again, I'm just pointing out some things to consider when it comes to your solution, but don't mean to derail or dismiss your ideas as a whole. I think that they're great stepping stones, I think that they solve some problems of scale and access for urban communities, and I think that they provide some access to control over one's food and energy sources, depending on how something like that would be implemented.

Thanks for calling me out on miscommunicating in my first response, I hope that this clarifies my position a little bit more!

siin, 6 months ago

@SpiritBearDreaming I'm going to consider your perspective, thank you so much for sharing. This feels resonant, but I can't quite pin down my exact feelings/thoughts on this yet. I'll update if I think of anything particularly valuable to add. Otherwise, I appreciate you sharing this with me!