The goal of people who walk the Free path is to protect their own life, their reproductive life, their communal life and the Earth's life. These tasks are tightly woven and knit together. They are not easy to separate, and attempting to do so is toxic to all tasks- much like an assembly line is toxic to craftsmanship.
You must first defend yourself and your life. For if you are dead you can do nothing. You must be able to defend your life before defending anything else becomes a possibility. But, those people who stop here are adolescents, short sighted and selfish and unable or unwilling to grow up.
You life does not belong to you alone.
Your life belongs to everything that shares your DNA, and that is everything on this planet that lives and replicates. Your life belongs to anything that you consume to remain alive- to the chicken unborn and the pig and the turkey, to the horseradish and the carrot and the lettuce and parsnip, to the bacteria that die and our digested in your gut so that you may process your food, to the influenza that you shake off and process like anything else in system.
Your life belongs to everything that has protected and nurtured you, from the earthworms that give you soil to grow food, to the oxygen that allows your lungs to breathe, to floods that fertilize the land, to the earth itself that makes all life here possible.
And so you must defend your life, because you owe it to everything that has kept you alive up until this moment. You may die at their hands of course, in a flood, beneath a mountain lion's fangs, in brush fire, trampled under stampeding cattle, taken by influenza or e. coli. The whole of life plays no favorites, the complex interwoven system favors nothing- no matter how we might like to pretend this is so. Fight with all your strength to survive and then have the grace to die with dignity. And remember, you live so that you can meet your obligations and protect the greater causes.
You protect your own life so that you may protect your reproductive life. All life, lives to reproduce. Life lives to create life and to perpetuate life. In this time of overpopulation, common wisdom would tell us that reproduction is bad, which of course is nonsense. Reproduction is not a sin, but the domesticated human's cultural and societal system that turns reproduction into a weapon and a factory is certainly not a good thing. Reproduction is the future, without reproduction the future falls apart with nothing there to construct tomorrow's stories.
So you must defend your reproductive life, because without it there is no tomorrow for your story. You must do this responsibly. The Hebrew's god may have commanded the Abrahamic religions to go forth and multiple, but the religions of earth ask only that you continue your story in a way that does not silence all others.
You must defend your life and your reproductive life, so that you may defend your communal life. Both of the earlier tasks are components in this task, for the community is made up of its members and its members past and its members yet born. True communities know each other, all each others in fact. They know not only your name, but your friends and your enemies. A community knows the whole web of interactions and intentions. This web in fact, is the community.
Human communities exist in groups of 200 or less, ideally around 150. Larger than this and the web breaks, the human mind is not adapted to hold more than 200 sets of social relations together in itself. Above that number the groups fractures into sub-communities and the unit is divided. Over large areas of course, this is necessary, but you should strive to find a coherent community in which you can belong and defend.
You must defend your life, your reproductive life and communal life so that you can defend the life of the earth. How a community lives and makes its living directly determines how it treats the earth, and this is foremost for this task. Do not damage the earth and seek to lay patches of the gashes you have torn. Seek to live harmlessly, seek to put back as much as you take. To do otherwise is to bleed the earth and to attack your communal and reproductive lives as well, for if you harm the earth- you harm you unborn descendants before they are even conceived.
Likewise, you must not support those things that harm the earth that others have created. You must oppose and resist when others attempt to injure the earth. There is no other way, because the ability of the earth to sustain life, is equal to our ability to remain alive.
You protect the earth by protecting your own life. You protect your own life by protecting the earth. There is not separation, there is no point at which these two facts diverge. There are no exceptions.
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