Anarcho-Primitivist Gathering 2008 and Urvision 2008

I was on two Green Anarchist gatherings this summer. Here's my experiences from them, first from the Anarcho-Primitivist Gathering, then below Urvision. By now I've just written what I've had the energy to write, I'll maybe add stuff later.

Anarcho-Primitivist Gathering 2008, Poland 1.-31.7.
The camp happened in the countryside of Northwestern Poland at a place with hilly fields of wild hay (like a yellow Teletubby Land) and forest, with farms nearby, the distance to the nearest village being 7km. Half of the time it was hot and sunny, half rainy, with a little thunder and one rainbow. Most of the time we were about 25 people, at moments around 40.

We spent our time mainly learning primitive/survival skills from each other and from books (there was a fantastic library compiled from the books people brought!), having meetings about the camp, talking about social and emotional issues, doing practical tasks to keep the camp going, networking, and doing what we pleased.

The structure varied but was mostly loose: we had two meals a day, a brunch and a dinner/supper ("dupper","supadupa"), and best this worked when we had a rota with at least two persons to take responsibility to cook each meal. We had a facilitated camp meeting whenever someone wanted to, and workshops and discussions when someone said they would like to hold one.

We bought most of our food (Poland is cheap!) from the town and local farmers and supplemented it with small game: mice, frogs and grasshoppers. We also caught fish with some nets people had wisely brought. We also learned to make nets, but none got that big yet.

To me, the most important part was talking about socio- emotional stuff. I see myself as being what I feel, and I think the most important thing to keep you alive and happy in any situation is to have a good community; I have read it is at least as important as having basic survival skills.

Some people introduced workshops and structures that substantially helped make camp life interesting and comfortable in this socio-emotional sense. Most remarkable was the flagging-and-discussion practice started by a victimization-enabling workshop held by two people who had been in the yearlong programme of Teaching Drum Outdoor School in the USA, where they had learned about the concept. (Here's a text about it from Tamarack Song who came up with it and runs the school.)

How I would explain the concept is that when something happens to push a person into a state of fear and insecurity, (e.g. from rules, competition, judgement, neediness, authority, blaming) she can either be in 'active mode', face the fear and reality of the situation and try to do something to make it better, or she can go to 'victim mode' and behave according to a pattern that doesn't actually do anything to solve the situation, just make her feel it is less her responsibility, make her forget it, or just feel a bit better for a moment by doing something that creates instant pleasure. By doing the latter one victimizes oneself - chooses a mindset telling her she is stuck, incapable of making her life better. Everyone has their own sets of coping patterns, but their common charasteristic is that they put respobsibility elsewhere and distract. Some are anger, judging, blaming, denial, withdrawal, or self-medication. Self-medication is doing something that brings instant pleasure while avoiding to face the problem, like, food, tv, meeting friends, drugs, or sports.

Enabling is reinforcing the victimized person's view of being stuck, saying that her state is in fact grave and that it's completely someone else's fault.

Activating is saying to the person in victim mode that there are many ways to look at it, that she still has many good things and richnesses in her life (like health, or friends, or being born in a rich country), that the victimized person is actually very strong and capable of helping herself and that there are many people who she can ask to support her, she being the most active in the situation. One can also activate by flagging, which I explain next. It's good for the activator to also be empathetic and validate the victimized person's suffering and say that it is not the way her life should be, while encouraging herself to seek ways to change it.

Everyone has their own fears and coping patterns. In the workshop we were told about a group method to help ourselves grow out of them into more active people in our lives. It's called flagging, and it means that people who have agreed to have it as a practice will, when they during ordinary life see each other victimize themselves, 'flag' each other by showing a V sign with two fingers, so that the victimized person realizes her behaviour and sees her chance in the moment to change her mindset to a more fruitful one. If the person in victim mode does not know what the other person thinks is in her behaviour victimizing, the flagger tells her.

Part of the flagging was to gather regularly to discuss with a talking stick and tell in turns what fears one had experienced in the last days, what coping patterns they and others had seen in theirselves and what the flagging felt like. This was enormously relieving to me, to share fears, and feel accepted in spite of my weaknesses. It was also good to hear I wasn't (certainly!) the only one with such problems. And it seemed to help everyone to stop their unbuilding behaviour. We got to criticize each other and talk about the problems that had arisen,which purified the air, and solved many problems and conflicts.

One of the things we also got around doing was a sweatlodge. A lot of people felt bad about it first when it was ready because the building didn't go so well, too few people did it, the others had just disappeared. But we talked about it and hopefully learned something. The building itself was fine and we had sweats there many nights, in different customs and atmospheres, sometimes silently, sometimes talking about our deep feelings and intentions, sometimes with ceremony. I have very fond memories of these, hearing people's deep thoughts in the dark ness and warmth, coming out to the cool air and see a bonfire (where the rocks had been warmed) with people around it. The sight was so right, loved people naked around it in the red glow against the dark blue of the hay hills and the lake shore. Dancing around the fire, diving in to the cold lake. One night there was a sudden sound like a horde of horses or ghosts approaching, or a huge wave, and suddenly rain hit us. The sweatlodge did begin to mean for me something holy, a little. I wish my whole life felt sacred, being in contact with my relations, like art.

The 'policy' about nudity was that everyone could be nude when they wanted. Before we came to the camp there had been talk on the mailing list about it, someone had said it should be 'has to be nude', but generally the opinion was that it was free choice. It was a hot summer and people were usually in few clothes, sometimes naked. I was also. It felt great to be so free, and also to see people's bodies, somehow, to see people whole and to see all the different forms that humans can be, that are usually hidden away, so that we only see anorectic models, or maybe ordinary people in the swimming hall. My friend there said once, having seen people hug and hold each other, that "it was wonderful to see that all these different bodies are loved". For me it felt very natural and home-like, and I was glad we trusted each other so much. I once heard one woman say that someone was looking at her breasts in a way that was uncomfortable to her, and in the flagging discussion circle some men said that they are struggling trying not to objectify women, but I didn't feel the atmosphere around nudity would have been sexually objectifying or otherwise tense. I don't remember dicussing nudity much apart from these two instances.

What personal problems affected my experience were the treshold of eating unuasually well:
without much spices and sugar and only two or three times a day. I knew it was healthy, but I had very strong cravings for my usual less healthy food. I was also constantly wondering if I was working enough. I have a long history of depression and I had some mild depression also sometimes during the gathering. How it mostly was visible was that I slept unusually long (once 18 hours), and although I would have wanted to go jogging or do work, I had no energy or felt it was meaningless in the end. Most people were empathetic and told me not to work more than I could, many also activated me by saying that I could help myself with my illness, for example starting to exercise regularly, while some expressed their frustration over my not working as much as they wanted or did. I sometimes felt that people treated me unfairly, didn't understand I couldn't force myself to work with my broken mind any more than a legless person could force themselves to walk. I was worried over the issue through the whole camp. I also heard later that one reason that some people didn't want me to join their group planning a community was that I didn't work as much as they. After I came back to Finland my depression hasn't been that bad, maybe partly because I've been jogging every week and eating anti-depressants and having a regular lifestyle. I hope that in the next camps I'll be as active as a normal person. I also wish and want to create more workshops about mental illness so that we crazy ones will be more understood and less discriminated in green anarchist circles also.

(There's still a little stuff about both A-PG and Urvision in the end of this post.)


Urvision 2008 in Sweden, South of Stockholm, in 11.-17.8.

Urvision happened in a wood some 5km from a little town which was some 30minutes' train ride from Stockholm (as far as I remember). The forest was lovely and versatile and so untouched that one could drink from its lakes!

The camp programme was full of workshops, often three at the same time. There was native contraception and parenting, making moccasins, felting, butchering a deer, shamanism, tenderness/sex/orgy workshop (I held it, I'll maybe tell more about it later), history of the green anarchy movement, and so many more I passionately wanted to take part in but can't remember.

There were perhaps 60 people at the most, it's hard for me to estimate. People went to dumpster dive with a car and brought the food to the camp over the lake with a canoe.

There was most magical playing, singing and dancing in the night, and some people had a skill for such hauntingly beautiful singing, that I sometimes doubted if this was real, or in fact a movie or a fantasy world. Sometimes I could hear singing from everywhere around me in the blue evening, watching over the still lake, a canoe sliding past.

One of the greatest teachings I got from this camp were from my personal relationships with friends and lovers. I realized my way of being polyamorous was irresponsible and hurting my loved ones. I had made promises I didn't want to keep and I was coming on to a third person when my friend was uncomfortable and jealous with it. Knowing I want to learn to treat everyone well I also know things like this happen everywhere all the time and workshops about relationship skills and polyamory would be a great thing in the next gatherings.

Like I said before, the most crucial part about rewilding for me is the socio-emotional sense. I feel I need a tight, trustworthy community of people who love each other in order to be able to live mostly outside towns, where most of my friends are. The feeling of being loved and valued is an essential need for me, probably for almost everyone. And also the need to be in balance with my feelings, be open and honest about them and my fears, and feel I am listened to and everything I feel is accepted. And not to try to satisfy my need for something essential with any cravings for something unneeded, like sugar - not to self-medicate myself. In order to be able to live in the wilderness I need to be able to let my emotions flow free and trust the people around me - feel that I'm loved, safe - feel that I'm home. In these camps I got some slight whiff that life could be like that, but for me there didn't develop many very close bonds with people, even though I would have liked it to. I did get many friends. But it takes a lot of time and trust for people to become close. And trust is something we have learned as children not to have. These are some of the essential areas where there is much to unlearn and learn in a new way. Trust, honesty, openness. They and tribe social life in general were sometimes talked about in workshops about Truthspeaking, which was also very valuable (I'll maybe tell about this in length later.) One of the things it contains is owning one's feelings: not saying "Look, you made me cry!" but rather cry and maybe say "I'm sad". Also this concept was introduced by someone having been at Teaching Drum.

It's tough really living with people and being in the wild, taking a leap of faith (although I knew I was going back to the city after the camps) and be more than a month in forests. You see the people every day, you fish, cook, dig shitpits, gather firewood and food and so on every day. You have to be honest and open about your feelings or you'll get conflicts that ruin the atmosphere. You can't hide anything from the people. Or I feel it's better the less you hide. If it was a real survival situation, people have to be able to live together, take each other into account. I really realized that what goes around comes around, if I hurt someone, I'll have to face and feel that other human's hurt every day when I see her. It was a great gift that I realized for example that I'm not being so good at for example polyamorous respect, being an 'ethical slut', that I wish I was. There was some talk about, I don't remember the world, something like clan consciousness or tribe thought: that one thinks about the tribe first, and then oneself. I understand most Natives have that as one of the foundations of their world view. It's a huge difference to our own individualism, competition, utter loneliness and distrust.

All in all, these camps were emotionally really, really heavy, but taught and changed me a lot, and for the better. I hope my life was more like those camps every day. I got so many friends and so much skills and knowledge. And like I said, I got a sense that my life could be so much better. Rewilding really makes me happier. Being more independent from the shops and money, and having closer, less violent relationships with Human People and all the other People, Lakes, Trees, Squirrels. I wonder if I'll organize an Anarcho Primitivist Gathering 2010 in Finland... anyone wanna plan with me?

+ some of the Scottish people has written her own description of the camp here: http://www.indymediascotland.org/node/11705