Why Does a Druid Ride a Lawn Mower?

Our industrial civilization seems to me to be in a state of suspended de-animation. The narcissistic techno imagadget cyborg drones are anything but animated. Their avatars are all over the internet while their bodies are aimlessly burning fossil fuels in support of an insanity continually left unnoticed. A new reality has come into existence. It's a reality never before seen, and it's a direct result of the lottery our species won which has paid us in concentrated golden energy derived from the sun. Most first world inhabitants have no idea how this lottery pay off has distorted our collective reality, or that it's a miniscule fraction on the time line that is the human experience on this living Earth. The portal by which our first world society now sustains this ridiculous electronic virtual contrivance, is the imagadget "smart phone."

The smart phone may be smart, but it's made us stupid. It's become a perpetual soul vacuum that's sucked the human spirit into it's electronic clutches. It's attached horse blinders to our collective imagination and crushed our bodies into useless meat riddled with nuclear powered cancer and super bugs. Super bugs that are hard at work creating a future misery the likes of which our anesthetized imagination cannot imagine. We look through this device to see a matrix composed of artificial constructs designed to be nice. The device keeps us all endlessly distracted from looking at one another, all while we spend all of our time looking at one another while scrolling through a multitude of lives taking place virtually. What more does one need than the phenomenon that is the "selfie?" How have we come to a place where it is considered completely normal to take a picture of one's self and then post it amongst a cascade of other selfies? Everybody is looking at themselves through this electronic mirror. Narcissist's reflective pool broadcast ubiquitously and completely. It's come to a place where putting down the drug is no longer possible. The will just is not there. The truth is that we all know how pointless this distraction has become...at least deep down in the recesses of our collective psyche.

We continue to wake up day after day stuck in this suspended de-animation. There are simply to many disgusting creatures crawling around just beneath the surface of the early 21st century human experience for us to fathom. This pretend land we take selfies in is made possible by third world wage slavery. The clothing we pay too much for that is featured in our masturbated pics was stitched together by a people whom might as well be living in a dumpster full of our second hand hedonistic stickyness. A dumpster that receives the shitty end of the planned obsolescence they slave away to create for us. Then there is the Earth that supports us which we have turned into a sewer of cast off desires which catches the overflow from the dumpster those unfortunate slaves live in. Each of us kings and queens entitled to create suffocating trash in a ritual of daily consumption. Drones fly and innocent brown people die for the energy to keep this diseased tragedy going and growing. Of course, none of this matters in the nice imagadget reality we all inhabit. Well, maybe not all of us inhabit that reality. I don't.

My world mostly takes place outside. Everyday I make it a point to pay attention to the natural world. That world doesn't require a grid to sustain itself. It doesn't require ancient fossil energy either. What it requires is a willingness to participate in the struggle for life. I'm attempting to learn how to participate in that struggle with grace and equanimity. This dance happens on the bio side of biophobia, and it requires acceptance of the gooey, slimey, smelly, living bodily fluid that is required to support life. It crawls in the soil and smells of Earth. It grows out of the ground and has an enduring intelligence the likes of which we should strive to possess. It pays us in natural splendor, taste, and fertility. It's time takes place in rotations, tilts, and revolutions. It's life follows the sun and sleeps on the Earth. This marvelous happening dazzles the senses in slow motion. The natural magnificence I'm describing does not show up on the imagadget. It doesn't fit that artificial electronic mold.

Where does all of this leave me and people like me? It leaves us stuck between artificial sustenance and quality starvation. Between pointlessness and a natural sanity thought putrid and insane by the imagadget followers. Followers that do not support the efforts needed most to keep our species healthy and thriving in the nonindustrial future which we have guaranteed our children will get. Which isn't a bad thing, it's actually good, but there's a lot of pain between now and the backside of that good. There's a lot of disease, starvation, marshal law, war, death and suffering to go before anything like good will come of it. At least the imagadget will eventually go the way of the dodo. What this all means to me is that I must labor at destructive, soul crushing, BAU support to keep my family out of debt and fed. I'm a nuclear engineer medic turned riding lawn mower/weed eater operator. I've dropped out of everything this society has offered up to me. I've done so because none of it could stand up to my personal sense of ethics. The nuclear engineering created toxic waste and killed lots of brown people. The once healthcare turned wealthcare and supported nothing but rich fuckers and their corporations. We have a large industry that makes people rich by parasatizing human bodies, and I'm not talking about the war machine here either. I'm talking about our wealthcare system.

This is all how a Druid has come to ride a lawn mower for money. This is all why a Druid cuts down trees, pulls up vines, trims ornamental shrubbery, and does all of the other trappings of conventional landscaping for money. It's one of the most pressing ironies of my life (and my employer is a 69 year old retired army Sergeant Major to boot). I do battle with nature for money, and then I come home and practice permaculture. I have a permaculture business named Ancient Earth Design, but nobody wants to pay for permaculture because they don't see the need for edible landscaping. They all see a need for the most worthless plants imaginable. Plants that only yield pretty and nice, but not medicinal and edible...or even useful for that matter. All of the nice ornamental plant growth gets carted off to that dumpster full of our stupidity to rot in the landfill with the diapers. Society pays a lot of money to keep the grass and ornamental landscapes trimmed up and under control. Society won't pay shit to have whole systems implemented on their landscape. Natural systems that work with nature to create abundance by way of food producing plants and animals. Society has no use for food and medicine. They're to busy texting, sexting, selfying, and just plan virtual masturbating to care about the natural world that sustains us all.

Eventually the permaculture system I have in place here on this one acre I live on will mature, and maybe I won't have to work at cutting grass for other people as much then. I don't care about money, but money cares about me. I don't care much about society either, but here I am, cutting their damned grass. I've thought about going back to college, but then I realized that college doesn't result in a job, it just results in debt. I know how to read books, and books are free at the library. Even if college does result in a job it's just more BAU support. BAU does nothing but destroy life. It produces food by killing everything in the soil with multitudes of poisons. It turns brown people into wage slaves and gives everybody cancer. I suppose none of that matters because the selfie nation doesn't care. At any rate, in the morning I'm off to go ride a lawn mower and operate a weed eater. At least nature will forgive me...I hope. It has to forgive me. After all, I have five different species of bamboo growing on this acre. I'm nursing the bamboo monster in hopes that it will grow up and destroy BAU. Consider this your warning! The bamboo monster is coming to getcha, and when he does this Druid will stop riding god foresaken lawn mowers. I much prefer the sickle.