I’d like to invite you to take a seat and get into a little new-age, hippy, philosophical, hipster, trippy, or other form of open-mind state. I promise the stories of the travels will be starting soon, and you’ll get to hear about all of the excitement and the even more prevalent mishaps and trip-ups, but just like all adventures, we have to start with a bit more thinking and dreaming before we can actually get there.
I’ve made the claim a couple times now that Natural Natures is tied up in philosophy, and I’d like to substantiate that claim. I know, philosophy and big words is a turn off, but don’t worry, I’m not going to go Aristotle on your ass. That guy is boring and really goes into way too much detail on everything. Personally if you have to read philosophy I’d go with Nietzsche. But these philosophers are neither here nor there, we’re talking real life and real shit, so let’s get down to it.
Anyone who has a lick of familiarity with history probably has noticed that there seem to be rebellious movements in culture at least fairly consistently. Most famously are the Flower Children hippies of the late 1960’s to 1970’s (a movement that I personally support since it gave us Jimi Hendrix, who needs a better reason?). Recently we have seen lots of new forms of cultural rebellion, some have taken the shape of political movements such as the Tea Party or the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
Some will want to come after me with pitchforks and torches for putting those two names so close together, but I’m only taking notice of the fact that this age and generation is inclined to some rebellious tendencies. This matters because NaturalNatures is a part of that rebellious mentality.
You see, this generation that we are a part of is the offspring of the generation that gave the world Flower Power. We see that the pursuit of our parent’s generation kind of just went kaput when they decided that they would like to have some money in their pockets. We watched as they put on suits or dresses and left the flower petals behind. As the rising generation we’re suffering from that obsession with money that took hold of our parents. We now can’t get jobs that could pay off the debt that getting a bachelor’s degree incurs, so we have resolved ourselves to living in flowers. But then we realize that there are not as many flowers around because Nature seems to be on a downward slope.
This makes us angry for a moment and we go and get angry and quit our poor paying jobs to join a resistance, but then we get hungry and fear ending up homeless, and then we have to go back to work again. Then we consider the fact that maybe it’s just because we are staying in one place that it seems like there are no flowers to be had. This leads to taking short breaks from our jobs to go traveling to see if we can find more flowers. Along the way we like to meet people face to face because we are tired of our underpaid positions that have us interact with other people via technology, which just removes all faces and increases the tendency of people to yell at each other and blame one another for things that are really the fault of the technology that is currently mediating the interaction.
Sitting in the Western Basin of Glacier National Park
I know, I’m starting to ramble, but I have a feeling that a lot of you reading this know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s why our generation has a tendency to travel, to support and love natural spaces, and wants to just tear apart the standards that our parents now ascribe to.
Now you might be starting to notice just how all of this works into NaturalNatures. I mean, here we are, traveling because the jobs we have don’t give us the satisfaction that we need. We get out into nature and hike through it and enjoy it because we realize just how precious it is, and we have grown up hearing how we’re losing it. Species are disappearing at alarming rates (around 1,000-10,000 times the usual rate), and ecosystems are falling apart.
Sure it doesn’t do much to get naked out on these trails in public places, but it does get attention. It also shows that we don’t want to be restricted by the standards of the past, we want to challenge those silly ideas of decorum that our parents picked up when they decided to put on suits and dresses after walking off of the fields at Woodstock.
They were the Flower Children, and so you might think of us as the Flower Grandchildren, but really we just want something like a natural life, and we want to keep nature alive. We just want some NaturalNatures. So hop on our figurative hippy bus and show the world that we don’t give a fuck what their old and dying standards say, we’re getting natural anyway.