Ramblings of a seeker

by David Laurin
Did you know that willow bark contains the active ingredient in aspirin? How do you think people knew how to make aspirin from willow bark?

We used to know stuff about nature. Lots of stuff. Somehow, either through shear intuition — intuitive knowledge coming from who knows where — or through perspicacious trial and error across eons; we knew that a willow bark concoction could cure certain ails. And we probably used the root for something else. Who knows.

And so it is that through knowing the thing even better through the scientific process, we were able to isolate and reproduce —massively so— the helpful compound. But isn’t strange that through this intense knowing process we have lost much knowledge from nature? The people who know how to chemically create aspirin are so far removed from us when compared to the old medicine man or woman who would boil tree bark into a brew for your illness, or chew leaves and slap them on your wound, or crack your bones back in place when you fell.

And so, we have lost connection with nature, and yet we are still very much dependent on it for survival. The difference is: the knowledge is far removed instead being close by. There is a certain sense of insecurity that comes from feeling removed from the knowledge. If something were to wrong with society, how would we know how to grow food? Make medicine from nature? Find safety from the elements? The truth is many would suffer and die, and they will if things go to shit. We have conquered nature in the sense that nobody needs to know much about it these days, but the colonization of nature has made us vulnerable to social instability. If our society crumbles, we’re basically fucked.

Does that sound like some unconscious stress people are carrying around? You  betcha. Sorry I’ll try to watch my language. But people know subconsciously that their comfort and survival is standing on shaky ground.


What’s crazy too is that if society crumbles and we lose the ability to use our specialized knowledge, we don’t have the basic knowledge to survive effectively. We would be starting again much farther below the people whose land we colonized. Our knowledge would go to almost zero, where they had thousands of years of knowledge accumulated  through thousands of years. And I believe Europeans actually maybe still have some ancient knowledge about their land more than we have in North America, where we arrived and took over the people who had the ancient knowledge about this land. The land is important. We rely on it for survival if organized, specialized, modern society crumbles. We are maybe learning this now and I hope we encourage the First Nations people’s to be empowered to promote their generational knowledge. Though I fear much knowledge has already been lost.


This whole diatribe was inspired by the book Amercian Gods by Neil Gaiman.