Staring into the Year End Campfire

When I set out to find the perfect Western, Biden was a Vice-President, Putin was a Prime Minister, Ukraine was a Russian client-state, Trump was a game show host, I had a heart that was 100% natural, and had never heard of the eight limbs of ashtanga yoga.  A lot has changed since then.

In those days, and the couple of years that followed, I spent a lot of meandering mental energy thinking about man in nature, the folly of civilization, completely ignored Hobbes, and longed for some kind of Tyler Durden-esque collapse of the status quo that would certainly have killed me within days.

(Side note: you know how life expectancies were so low back in ye olden days?  It wasn’t because everyone died at 35, it was because so many people died of things that we can prevent or manage today.  If I were born 50 years earlier I would not have lived past 40, and probably would have had trouble making it to my 20’s.  A friend asked me mid-pandemic why I was so cranky and depressed all the time and that it was bringing down all my co-workers.  I said that if the Qanon-MAGA hat crowd decides they don’t like the election results and start a civil war I’ve got 60 days max before a disrupted pharma supply chain kills me.  He thought that was ridiculous, then we had Jan 6.  He also occasionally read this blog.  Hi RC!)

In the decade since the allure of the return to primal has faded… a little.  I mean, I did save the picture above from The Last Book You’ll Ever Read, a graphic novel by Cullen Bunn about that exact re-wilding of civilization.  A lot of my non-western hiatus was spent reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, time travel hunting books, pulp safaris, Hemmingway’s hunting stories, etc.  I think that with a lot of yoga study I saw that there is a happy hunting ground between civilization and the wilderness.

Several times I’ve set out to make a Dungeons and Dragons character that felt like a Saddhu, the ascetic wandering yogis that still exist today.  My buddies assume that I’d make a monk, but the times where I’ve done it I’ve always made some kind of Druid. 

Yoga, particularly Shaivist Tantra yoga I study, is pretty primal.  You can’t really experience it unless you can experience it in your body first.  Not that you’ve got to be a super athlete; I started my study without a sternum, not a lot of complicated yoga postures happening at that time.  The quintessential yogi for me is Shiva- one of the three faces of God, Lord of Yoga, sitting on a mountain, meditating and surrounded by animals.

There is also some evidence that Cernunnos (the Celtic & Gaulic god that is a precursor to Herne, the Wild Hunt, and the Green Man) is Shiva.  So yeah, the druids were yogis.

That ascetic, austere seeker going to the mountains to meditate always appealed to me.  Why do people go to find enlightenment on top of a mountain?  Because you are never the same person at the top that you were at the start.  I even wrote about that way back in 2013.  Just this week I got thinking about this chain:

The Saddhu, seeking a quiet perch on a mountaintop to meditate.

The Druid, wandering the expansive forests and mountains of Britain getting list in vision of the Otherworld.

The Mountain Man, leaving the civilization that defined him to live apart from societal binds and expectations.

The Saddhu, the Druid, the Mountain Man, all connected.

Happy New Year.  Time for one last hike.