"Since we are social animals, who depend on one another, to show love and compassion is wise." - Dalai Lama
To resist or to renounce.
I like Sherwood.
No helped-label here, the one that all the helpers want to give me when they need to help. It’s more cheaply expensive and I hope I won’t get very sick and hungry but I haven’t got the label here and it’s not all my wrecked fault. I can look into many eyes and say without saying that I haven’t any officially helped label that is like a box without doors.
I like Sherwood.
The illusion of being free is greater here.
It takes time to get used to it.
I’m not going back into the box.
Some are kings, others fools. Others again are fooled around with, hoping not to die again.
I like Sherwood.
The illusion of being free is greater here.
We’re lost in this anarchic wood. Like those who got lost here before, let’s eat bread together and keep each other company. It’s getting dark again but we can dream together that we don’t have to fight anymore to be like an anyone else that nobody has ever met and stop doing so because we’re too broken.
I like Sherwood.
The illusion of being free is greater here.
To resist or to renounce.
Sherwood, from the Robin Hood stories, has inspired the term “Sherwoodisation”. It’s not a place as such but peopled by the likes of NEETs (1), citizens disengaging at different stages of life and not recognizing themselves in the ways certain social and economic systems function and / or are fed up of being trapped in one social protection box. Until some (often faceless) civil servant decides it’s going to be another label and off to another helped-box and a so on that seems to never end.
It can happen without much room for a decent escape, something like a nice paid job that corresponds to personal values, hope if not what has to be bought and had to be accepted and acceptable by internalized social expectations. If engaged in the first place, as a citizen, there is a loss of trust at a certain point that makes “Sherwood” daily life more interesting and, in a way, more livable. There are also the facts that paperwork can be very complicated, having to prove being in need is not easy to do and face up to, and that social injustices and inequalities can make the whole “game” pointless. The “winners” have already won, they are just playing around with the “losers” until something changes and a “happy few losers” become “the new winners”, and do the same thing. With such a mainstream frame of mind, the amount of losers is close to infinite, being a winner is a fragile condition and both situations are reflected through possibilities, opportunities, bank accounts, houses, holidays, that mirror power and powerlessness. The power, also, a frame of mind has over basically equal human beings, as in we all have to eat, sleep, we all get stuck, sick and die. And we all need the support of friendship (basically free, unless it’s the winners we have to be friends with, or the losers, or the… who is it now?) when having to survive and losing sight of what it is to live, and live well.
Poverty and sickness are rampant, it crawls over eyes and covers them with a nightmare that can be difficult to forget, when over, and can come back anytime.
How to see through is not an answer I have.
Egolessness has it, I think.
(1) https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/young-people-and-neets-1
"Because anger and hostility destroy our peace of mind, it is they that are our real enemy. Anger ruins our health; a compassionate attitude restores it. If it were basic human nature to be angry, there'd be no hope, but since it is our nature to be compassionate, there is." - Dalai Lama
chameleonian times 