Forest Poetry

As explained in our article “The Problem of Technology”, humanity has lost many things through its obsession with mechanistic advancement. Here are some things we stand to win by using technology in a responsible manner, or not using it at all.

Community: While communications technology connects us to ever more distant people, it disconnects us from our more immediate environments, leading to isolation and social ineptitude. With the time you gain back by not using communications to interact with or read about distant people who are most likely inconsequential, focus on developing relationships with your family, friends, church, and township.

-Join a cultural group (choruses, historical societies, environmental initiatives, book clubs, newspapers, churches etc.) in your community and help it to flourish.
-Take a role in town politics.
-Pick and maintain close friends.
-Teach your children a useful skill, like fishing.
-Take time off with your spouse.

Environment: Much how communications technology has attached us to people with whom we have no spiritual or pragmatic relationship, it has also attached us to lands that are foreign to our own, warping our sense of cultural and geographical identity, as well as robbing us of skill sets that can only be gained through a close relationship with wilderness. Skip the irrelevance associated with being a “citizen of the world” by foregoing overexposure to international media, and instead become a citizen of your backyard and the land and streets surrounding it.

-Work and play near your place of residence, and spend time becoming accustomed to the outdoors through cycling, hiking, hunting, or the like.
-Know what crops grow well in your region, and learn how to cultivate, prepare, and store them.
-Know the game and edible wild plants of your region, well enough to be able to survive off the land alone if you had too.
-Know the streets and trails in your community well enough to give accurate directions to any thinking passerby.
-Know the history of the land you live on, why it’s important, and teach this to others.

Mental: Technological advancement has provided access to an exponentially increasing pool of data in the form of electronic media, but overexposure to this hollow information can desensitize and preoccupy us, robbing our minds of mental quietude. With the mental space that you gain by ignoring excess media like television, spend time devoting yourself to a task that exercises and improves your brain, rather than filling it with useless “facts”.

-Pray regularly.
-Take on creative projects, such as building a table for your house, or writing poetry.
-Develop new skill sets, and improve old ones. Focus on your weak areas, and learn by doing rather than reading.

It should be stated that while it is nice to think that self control alone can accomplish these goals, for many of us this is unrealistic. Do not be afraid to throw away the television, break a CD in half, unplug the computer, or even cancel your subscription to national newspapers if the temptation proves too great.

All this comes with the added benefits of money saved and time reclaimed. Plus you will have a renewed sense of self confidence at your ability to ignore modern trends, and instead forge a better path.

Additionally, while disconnecting from modernity and re-connecting with the immanent is indeed a spiritual mandate, and will reflect and augment our spiritual health, it can never replace an actual connection to spirituality in itself. We should never use activity as a surrogate for philosophical understanding, and perhaps most importantly we should not mistake one for the other.

The obvious irony of all this is that you are reading these words thanks to some form of electronic technology, and we are writing them with the assistance of that technology. As explained before(“The Problem of Technology”), this can only be rationalized as being a temporary, necessary evil, whose consequences are far less severe than the alternative. In any case, these words are written with the intent and hope that once their meaning is fully comprehended and internalized by all, then we will no longer desire the machines on which they were written.