I can’t wait to be gone, out of the cold Vancouver rain and out on the road. Free to escape the impending doom portrayed through the evening and day time news and print. Give myself a chance to escape the town-homes and growing number of pointless strip-malls which have begun invading the receding forest areas around my home. Leave behind the incessant nagging of global warming while grandparents living in 5 million square foot homes drive around in one of their multiple gas hogging vehicles, out consuming shit and slowly deteriorating off a mountain of pharmaceuticals (mountains have run off, run off ends up in the water). I won’t miss the whining drone of the televisions or the rampant pounding of adverse greed and want, or the poor bitching of the people expecting someone else to take away their problems while continually handing their freedoms away in trade for the illusion of safety. Slaves to their illusion, corporate continues to beat them with there own illusions like a rubber mallet driven repeatedly to the skull. Meanwhile waters are poisoned and soils degrade, chemicals and vaccines ingested, causing fear and illness that lets the circle spiral down and out of control.
Sure it’s easy to say goodbye to something or someone, but it’s with great difficulty that we find ourselves trying to let go and forget. As for the physical it’s nothing we can escape, only change. If only, this escape, being a brief fraction of life, let it be an enema of thought, a continuation of the genocide of the culture of death from my mind.
This will be a chance to give my soul a breather from the beating barrage of western culture. Though I would admit one would need bury their head in the ground to truly have it vanish, but retreat from the enemy may help with brainstorming on ways to make the giant fall. There are few things easy enough to leave behind and there are those, with whom escape is impossible.
With all this, it is with great respect that I see the most promise of freedom in the community of climbers. While the pastime of climbing continues to gain momentum in popularity the core values have yet to be lost. Climbers must be one of the largest groups of active believers of respect and restoration of the real world. Real being defines as the self sustaining ecosystem which we are no longer a part of, having abandoned it in search for nothing while consuming everything, including happiness itself, the fundamental part of real beauty.
I forecast a great change will happen with the strength of the ever-growing community of climbing. A time will come when man will die and human being will be reborn in freedom. So on January fifth I invite you to tag along on my journey of the western seaboard as I explore with camera, pen and open mind.
