The Butterfly Effect
The Turning Feral Devotional - Day 66
Day 66: Not everything is what you expect it to be. Thirteen years ago I was living by myself in the small village of Rustavi in the Republic of Georgia. This was a small enclave of people about an hour's bus ride outside of the country’s capital and was nestled in the foothills that lead down toward Azerbaijan. On one of my commutes back from the Tbilisi police headquarters where I worked I stopped at a local bazaar to get something for dinner. I picked up some bread, cherries, ground meat, and being a particularly hot day I requested a cold bottle of water, which the old man running the stall handed to me directly out of his tiny refrigerator.
After paying, I went on my way toward my soviet-style ground floor apartment which was about a two mile walk away. About halfway there I pulled out the sweating bottle of water, unleashed the cap, and took a big swill to quench my thirst. Instead of the sweet relief of cold water on my throat, I was met with a burning sensation that fired up through my nasal passages and caused me to spew the liquid all over the cracked sidewalk in front of me. Looking down at the cold bottle, I quickly realized that the old man at the food stall had accidentally handed me the one thing that was helping him get through his day… grape-skin vodka hidden in a regular water bottle… a liquor better known as chacha or Georgian moonshine.
The taste of that particular style of soviet hillbilly liquor was seared into a corner of my brain that will never be scrubbed away and will likely be the starting point of my future dementia. But, the point here is not about accidental encounters with 95 proof homemade liquor, but rather that many times in life we expect one thing and get something else. In that moment I, for some unknown reason, walked the whole mile back to the stall to take that bottle of trash back to the poor old man. He was elated to see me bringing back his crutch for which he gave me a live chicken. Yes, a whole clucking, live-as-day, chicken. A chicken that I reluctantly tucked under my arm and quickly anthropomorphized on my walk home. Not knowing what to do with my new friend, I called a local acquaintance to help me reluctantly dispatch and eat the poor thing.
Yes, this is a bit of a butterfly effect story in-so-much that this is the true origin story of my getting exposure to a more self-sustained lifestyle. At that time in my life I had no intent of Turning Feral, yet sometimes when you take a hold of something thinking it’s one thing you find out the contents are wholly different than what you were expecting – and in those moments when things unexpectedly taste the most vile, if you keep your eyes open you may find yourself experiencing things that will alter the trajectory of your life.
Journal Prompt: What unexpected events in your life have put you on a path to explore self-sustainability?:
Motivational Passage:
Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of few perceives what has been carefully hidden in the recesses of the mind.
-Phaedrus
Rewilding Action: What’s in your winter car kit? I recently put together a little video about the top 10 things I always carry with me while driving our winter road. Take a minute to see what you have available if you get stuck in your vehicle for longer than an hour… Are you missing anything?