Dead, by the rules

Our bureaucracy is so thick, so heavy, so integrated into our heads and our skin and our internal systems that we don't even realise it is telling us what to do. That it is taking our ability to live and devouring it like sweets. That it is killing us. And, that in response to this, we are laying down like sleeping dogs in the sun to have our heads and hands and legs cut off.

Did you know you can't drink water without chemicals in it these days? Did you know you can't drink the rain without breaking a law? Did you know you can't even catch the rain to use for anything without having a state-issued permit to do so?

Did you know you can't sleep somewhere without paying for it?
Did you know you can't even live anymore without money?

There is something deeply grating and deeply depressing about that to me.
Something that my skin cries out against and my heart strains to run from.
But it is something that I cannot outrun.

Or, if I could, I haven't discovered how.
But I'm willing to learn. Willing to leave this all behind for a life that humans once had, that was much richer than all this convenience and ease and complacency.

To know what a bird's calling means, and have it mean something more than a mild interest. To know how to fell an animal, take its flesh, eat and use the remains out of necessity. To forage for edibles in a wild landscape, and actually need to survive from them. To understand what the plants did, how they lived, how they grew, and to know how to use them out of a need to use them - not out of a interest to be interesting and unique.

To be free from the ridiculous laws that are apparently protecting me from death - at the cost of the quality of my life. To be free from the ridiculous laws apparently protecting me from the danger of my fellow human - at the cost of a true community.

I am wanting increasingly more and more to run away from all of this, just drop the keys and leave it all behind. To run into the wild and try as I might to survive. To be wild and free. To make some little place for myself and own the cost of my living there and to know the reality of what my living is.

But even that I can't do without money or without breaking the law. Without being irrelevant and just as much in the system as I was before, or without being irrelevant for being locked away.

Perhaps, the latter irrelevancy would not be so irrelevant. And perhaps, we should just break the law now, at any rate.

But what can one human do alone?
Is there anyone who will go with me?
Anyone willing, anyone who can hear, anyone who wants to see again?

Anyone at all at least half willing to try for a change?