Karl Anemone

After spending the day with Marx and Engels, I have to say that I feel utterly drained. Good reading, but totally tapped out. Trying to write out a lesson plan for The Communist Manifesto has also zapped a lot of my energy. I'm walking a fine line between trying to be open that I am a learner too, while not looking like a guide who doesn't know what she's doing. Tricky indeed.

In tandem with reading this document for class, I started Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild. This thing is absolutely rocking my world. I was up until 4 in the morning reading because I just couldn't stop. Renee Askins is a wise soul and with a musical way of telling her stories. I finished chapter two and just began sobbing uncontrollably. This book resonates like you wouldn't believe. I have a feeling this book has a great deal to teach me, and has come to me at an important moment.

I was just thinking about the portion of the Manifesto in which M&E go into man's isolation from the natural world. Cities have tamed and paved over all that is wild and free, all that makes us connected to a larger web. For M&E, this related to the whole alienation bit that they are going on about. (By the way, I like to say M&E really fast in my mind so it sounds like sea anemone. You have to add the sea bit yourself, but it makes for a fun little private game. ...at least for me, it does.)

From Karl to Renee, this question begins to loom large in my mind's conception of human history. Where did the wild go?