We seek to redefine what it means to be human in this modern world. In an age of seemingly endless extraction, and disconnection from that which sustains our basic needs, we look for the frayed ends which we can weave back into relationship.

We have all traded our personal power for conveniences, the promise of technology to deliver an ease of life and an abundance of free time to spend things like relationships, fun, art, and deeper wisdom...but at the peak of modern technology we are starved of deeper meaning, our inter-dependent relationships with each other and the world have been replaced with the transactional medium of money, the one-size fits all path to meeting our needs.

But this approach of needing only this one thing to survive has left us fragile, dependent on a system of extraction, corruption, and exploitation which is harming our earth and its inhabitants for the sake of the comforts of the few lucky enough to afford it.

True wealth, which are naturals resources like clean air, water, the beauty of an open skyline filled with rocks and trees, teeming with an abundant diversity of non-human life, perhaps a flowing river...and timelessness...these things have been replaced by the clock and a carrot at the end of a stick called wealth of the monetary kind...the imagined kind which only those that win the contructed game can have. What used to belong to everyone is now a product, and a privilege of playing the game. The definition change even encourages us to trade in real wealth for artificial wealth, desecrating our natural resources. We can buy our sacred resources back in increments, counted and weighed, at a price they name.

But "they" are no enemy. They are us, seeking shiny, new progress. No hierarchy could have power without our reliance. We are like a child protesting the parent, while enjoying the warmth and comfort of a bed at night and a meal on the table. Most of us, we have no skills to actually survive without money. We are babies suckling at the teat of civilization, and we can protest all we want, but as long as we outsource our needs we have little power to demand any change, we essentially are bluffing, or at best, inconveniences to the machine which may throw us a bone occasionally, but will keep on consuming, as it is designed to do. A machine of eternal growth on a finite planet, which is bound to self-terminate.

These are the deeper reasons why we seek to regain skills that seem archaic or unnecessary.

Perhaps, there is a balance between our ancestors which brought us here over a hundred thousands years, and the modern era of comfort, progress, and vast destruction of the ecosystem in less than 200 years. Maybe we could find material comforts nestled within deeper comforts of continued existence for generations to come, an existence that nurtures our planet and diversity of life on it.

For each skill we learn or relationship we build to replace reliance on money, we gain power to pass on, freeing ourselves from fragility, gaining existential sovereignty and expanding our sense of self to include all the web of existence to which we rely, dissolving the illusion of independence money gives us. This is a paradox. By becoming sovereign we also realize our dependency. This is how we enter adulthood, as individuals and a species. This is how we survive. Not as babies, not as adolescents pushing our boundaries of power always, growing like a caterpillar consuming all we can, but as butterflies emerged. Pollinating and expanding on the matrix of life.