Any Flicker of the Flame
The Turning Feral Devotional - Day 63
Day 63 - Fragile is the best word to describe the world we live in. And no, this is not the beginning of some diatribe on ‘impending doom’… It’s just reality. Over the past few years, really since COVID, it has become patently obvious that everything is teetering on the edge. I feel it, you feel it, we all feel it.
Food production and distribution has been up and down. Heck, there have been multiple times I have gone to the store in the past few months to find limited or no eggs and meat available.
Food supply, fragile.
Recently we watched our best friends go through the loss of their infant daughter, we unexpectedly lost our child’s first nanny to heart failure, my best friend lost his mother to COVID, and we nearly lost my wife and unborn son to a severe head injury.
Life, fragile.
Personally, we have gone through almost eight months of unemployment and watched our ‘safety net’ of savings get demolished.
Economic security, fragile.
I talk to people everyday, well educated and employable people, struggling to make ends meet by taking on extra jobs.
Mental and family security, fragile.
Then right now, as a large winter storm rolls across our country, I see people worried about the energy infrastructure after what happened in Texas a few years ago.
Infrastructure security, fragile.
Everything. Is. Fragile.
This is not new news, but the culmination of recent events nationally and in my personal life have brought it to the fore. And though my wife and I have been on a “Turning Feral” journey for a few years, the tentacles we still have plugged into the matrix make us feel the hurt. Mortgages, the need for industry jobs, and subsidizing our food habits with store bought fare all take it’s toll and we are subjected to each of their inherent fragility.
So, what to do? Well, there is no way fully to cut and run, and part of the journey is to grin and bare it… which we are doing to the best of our ability. Right now, keeping our faith and knowing that things will be provided for is what we are relying on, but tactically these experiences have made us accelerate our plans to remove as many ties to the matrix as possible. For example…
Mortgages? We are refocused on paying that down with aggression. Food supply? Well first I need to become a better hunter, but we are also planning to up our gardening and livestock game in the coming years. Power sources? We have solid and tested backups with natural gas and other fuel, but we want to setup a small solar farm as an augment. Income? I am still pursuing a role in the tech industry, but we will push to grow our variable income by selling books, furs, planners and other odds and ends that we find our interests being pulled toward.
It’s a fragile world, this we know, but at the core I hope many of you are like us… folks who are enjoying a happy healthy family and taking the broader evidence of fragility seriously. We are trying to remember that we can’t sit by passively expecting others to take care of things on our behalf, but instead we must create a plan to build personal security where broader society is ignoring it.
Daily Prompt: What is the most fragile aspect of your current life? Do you have a plan to mitigate that fragility if it rears it’s ugly head or possibly collapses? If not, take time to sit and really think it through:
Motivational Passage:
“When night comes on in a room lit by kerosene, any flicker of the flame can give the sense that darkness is about to triumph.”
-Larry Wetson
Rewilding Action: We’ve talked a lot about tire repair and being prepared to service your own issues as they come up. Though it’s not a perfect fix, using slime or plugs is a great way to get some longevity out of a punctured tire… I made a video of me doing just that with a punctured SxS tire the other day: