a few years ago, on a mushroom trip in eastern oregon, i had the feeling that i was connecting on a spiritual level with my pre-human primate ancestors, as if i could feel the echoes of energy of the people who might once have inhabited the river valley in which i was camped. i rolled on the ground, scooped clay from the river and formed it in my hands, and peeled an avocado and ate it like an orange.
while this is obviously an extreme and somewhat silly example, it speaks to a larger pattern in my life of attempting to get back to my roots, so to speak. i’ve eschewed traditional exercise programs in favor of “primal movement” patterns such as monkey walking, frog hopping, crawling, running outdoors, and hanging from a pull-up bar (someday i’ll be able to do pull-ups for real). i walk barefoot in the park, rain or shine. i do my best to eat a diet of mainly unprocessed fruits and vegetables (and of course, since i am not a chimp but a human primate with a particular sense of ethics, tofu and the occasional mock meat i hunt from the refrigerated section). my screen time has dwindled and my youtube algorithm has begun to skew from internet drama commentary to afrobeats, handpan meditation, or djembe sets that i listen to while i journal or craft or do the aformentioned monkey workouts. i do my best to navigate the city by eye and recall my appointments by memory or from a paper calendar. though it might not be obvious at first glance, even my affinity for the rave scene traces back to this desire for the primordial. to lose myself in a throbbing mass of humanity united by the joy of moving to the sound of drums and instruments (even if computer-generated) and entranced by the twinkling lights of the fire (even if it’s actually LEDs and lasers) activates those same urges in me. i know i’m not alone in these feelings. the popularity of things like the paleo diet (though of course, like all diet trends, this has long been replaced by the next big thing, and the next and the next), or the recent analogue trend, or, to indulge in a bit more of a humorous example, the “reject humanity, return to monke” meme, speaks to our collective desire for a simpler life. our sanitized, frictionless environment and the lifestyle that requires us to act as button-pushing, chair-sitting automatons has left many of us westerners bored, physically and emotionally stiff, and unsatisfied.
today after my run, i found a tree in the nearby park that looked perfect for climbing. so i climbed it. it had been years since i climbed a tree. why do we stop climbing trees as adults? it’s so much fun. i’ll definitely be back to that tree, especially as i continue hanging and get more proficient at supporting my body weight with my hands. the feeling of kicking my shoes off and wrapping my fingers and toes around branches was exhilarating. when i came home, i thought, i’m chronically in artist’s block, but what art would i make if i was an early human? i’d probably paint my hands on the walls of my cave. so i did. i graffitied the entryway to my apartment when i first moved in, so i had nothing to lose by adding more paint over it. it’s such a simple thing to place your handprint on a wall. but to someone living thousands of years ago, it must have been so powerful to be able to do that, to make those marks no other animal could that say “i was here! i existed!” as i worked i tried to imagine what that would feel like.
of course, there’s no way to really know what any of that feels like. all of what i’ve written is a contrivance. those animal movement workouts i do were learned on the internet. the fruits and vegetables i eat are trucked in from, at minimum, different cities, if not countries. and i was not daubing the pigments of crushed berries or minerals onto the walls of the otherwise anonymous cave i sheltered in after my day of hunting and gathering, but rather spraying chemical paints onto the drywall of my climate-controlled downtown studio, from which i can walk to obtain my neatly packaged tofu and coffee grown halfway around the world. i’m not really a primal human, and a good thing too. i don’t have the heat tolerance or protective melanin to live in a climate where i could be naked and eat fruit all day, to mention the least of the problems. i’m suspicious of anyone who waxes too poetic about the virtues of primitivism. the eugenics implications alone are indicting.
however, i’m not ready to throw up my hands and give up my deep squats and salad greens. these principals have enriched me physically and emotionally, even if the methods are impure and the results diluted by technology. surely there’s still a benefit to attempting to live more in alignment with our ancestors, even if it’s just in simple things like finding more playful ways to exercise or a justification for eating healthier. finding a healthy level of friction in our lives must be better than allowing our brains to become AI-generated mush. i couldn’t tell you what the right way to live in alignment with our nature is. we probably all have to figure it out for ourselves.
as for me, i’ll be climbing trees and painting my hands on the walls of my cave.
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