Searching the shelves for vegan cheese, swerving other mask-clad supermarket ghosts, I started to think about how far from nature we have come to be. Like a lap cat, domesticated, only finding interactions with the wild on the odd weekend away or in small daily doses from house plants. I started to feel the same pull from my gut that I have had since I can remember, to forgo society and retreat into the forests, to lay a tent down in the moss and never come back, to finally be apart from the mechanics of systematic human taming.
In this fantasy, I run through the long grass, skyclad and howling in a language only the badgers and oak understand. Memories of ‘government’ and ‘societal responsibilities’ fading with every sunrise.
I would live off the land, existing neither as an apex predator or as a herbivore, but as some kind of tree spirit that mostly survives by photosynthesising, swimming in the rivers and lighting fires at night to warm my paws on.
I would sleep in a hollow of moss and tree branches, like an oversized robin, peacefully slumbering beneath the stars, far away from mass producing factories and supermarkets full of ghosts and vegan cheese.
Obviously, there are some plot holes in this plan, but a swap monster/girl can dream eh?
Often, I find myself envying wild animals, not bound to any moral compass, not compelled to check the news or to make small talk with the other badgers. It looks blissful in its own cold, damp way.
I think about the many ways the government and our society tames us, supressing and oppressing our wild nature and intuition, making food that barely contains enough nutrition to deserve the title, selling out to pharmaceutical companies that prescribe expensive and damaging drugs without any real insight into the root of the problem; treating the symptoms not the cause.
In these uncertain times, to own your intuition and your inherent value is to hold power. In a landscape where the people in power are not to be trusted, who can we trust but ourselves?
And how can we trust ourselves if we lay, complacent to our own taming; a trained poodle following commands and rolling over as soon as our masters say the word.
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