Don’t abdicate your ancestral American birthright of liberty through political ambivalence. Use your conscientious objection, aka your buying power and your time, to make a statement by taking small steps to lower your carbon footprint, grow your own and get off the grid.
The revolutionary spirit of liberation and hope always and everywhere remains, even dormant or confined to dreams, like a seed culture, ready anytime to multiply, thrive, and transform, given the right conditions. They need to germinate, grow, bloom, die and be reborn… if we look at history, we see that we have been here before and returning to a lifestyle closer to nature will allow us to live to our potential despite the chaos.
“The state of being excited by emotion or passion, agitation, excitement … a state of agitation tending to bring about a purer, more wholesome, or more stable condition of things.” The word “ferment” derives from the Latin forvtre, “to boil.” “Fervor” and “fervent” are other words from the same root. Fermenting liquids bubble just like boiling liquids. Excited people can channel the same intensity, and use it to create change.
Though fermentation is a phenomenon of transformation, the change it renders tends to be gentle, slow, and steady. Contrast fermentation with other transformative natural phenomena: fire, water, air & earth.
In the realm of social change, fire is the revolutionary moment of upheaval; romantic and longed for, or dreaded and guarded against, depending upon your perspective. Fire spreads, destroying whatever lies in its path, and its path is unpredictable. Fire in its physical appearance can do for you what the sun itself does for the whole world – it provides you with light and warmth and can serve you as heat source to cook upon. Fire is also an impulsive and a dangerous element, it spreads whenever it can and tries to infect everything with its rebellion against the boundaries of existence, as it wants to destroy, only to return to the love of hearth, it’s source. It bubbles rather than burns, and its transformative mode is gentle and slow. Steady, too.
