The latest round of destructive policies and taxes seems to have spared no one. Just in case anyone might have still had a few dreams or aspirations left since 2020. Farmers, landlords, landowners, business owners, employees, schools, students, and anyone who has anything they can deem worthy of taxing. I joked about them taxing us per breath or per blink a while ago, and honestly, if I think they thought they could implement it, they would.

But as schools, colleges and universities are where the initial conditioning and societal training begins, we’ll look at that. I have previously written about the ideas and effects of various ideas around it in Institutionalised, Scehuled for Learning and Your Digital Informer. Even though many things have been evident for decades about how the system is rigged, unsafe and not fit for purpose, the idea of what they once were for remains. Except now you don’t really have the benefit, and it comes with an awful lot of strings attached and small print. Teachers having more influence now than they perhaps should, not just in a child’s education for learning of basic skills, it seems now they are to be heavily involved in a child’s formation of self, and path that is expected to take. But the psychological separation of child from parent, is a mental one they seem to be trying to kick start at a very early age, and to be honest, there is a natural point at which children will do that anyway, but in a more fluid and organic way, even if they don’t have the most stable homelife. But to teach children things they have no real context for and may not even be age appropriate, from what appears to be a position of authority, is a dangerous game to play in my view. Overloading and overwhelming a developing mind, and then hoping to be the one to give it guidance when it has a multitude of other influences and input all going in is a bold strategy, and one I fear is set up to fail.

Which brings me to the question I ask myself these days, and have done previously as the landscape for employment and the future of industry has been changing. What is the point of compulsory institutionalised education? Is it to train the next generation of skills and workers? That’s what I used to think, and it did appear that it was it was there for, but as you look a little deeper into the history of it all, and how schools came to be, then it seems like A Rather Dark Enterprise like all the other places where they decided lots of children should be ‘groomed’ for the future. Separated from their parents for a good portion of their childhoods, to be educated by the people who have a want from it, more than just for everyone to be a capable, contributing, free-thinking human being. And the facade that we were working towards something logical, well, that has truly been dropped now, with a very haphazard system being swept in to overrun what was there before.

But even if you did happen to notice something wasn’t quite right, it isn’t always as easy as it might appear to just take back control of yourself and your family. Homeschooling is on the rise, but for years it was sort of laughed at, and stigmatised in society. I remember also being that type for a while, believing the hype that you have to go to ‘proper school’, you must do exams, you must go to college, and university to get the best shot at competing for employment and a life. But that’s just what you are told, to try and keep you in school and following that path of continued education for an awfully long time. Twelve years I think it is for standard education, or was in my day, now it might be fourteen as they were talking about raising the age for it. So, by the time you are starting to properly mature, you have spent a tragically long amount of time not being or doing what might have come naturally, or around people you chose to be around. Instead, you are moulded into something, by way of circumstance and forced guidance, and if you are lucky, a little bit of who you actually are gets to shine through in that journey. Now it’s become even more complicated for that phase of people’s lives, with lockdowns, sinister schedules to be administered, psychologically confusing material for them to assimilate and a very buckled society forming. And to be honest, I think that probably counts for everyone at whatever stage of life they are currently at, because it isn’t just at school this conditioning happens, that’s just the first phase. And that sinister and buckled society seems to be wanting us all to be locked in a room and seated for education, while they condition us for their ‘next phase’…

(c) K Wicks

A reading of my article – Margaret or Jack?

(c) K Wicks

A reading of my article – No Going Back

(c) K Wicks

Trees often get represented as bringing their own feeling and atmosphere, in movies and fictional settings, misty, foreboding, creepy, and sometimes downright scary. The Blair Witch Project springs to mind there, and many others where the trees are part of the sinister plot. Poltergeist being another film that came to mind, of the trees coming alive and coming through the windows. Like I said, there are countless horror films that use a wooded setting or trees at night to create a sinister feeling. But why is it that they work so well for that? In daytime and sunshine, trees and woods can be quite wonderful and relaxing, creating a feeling of calm and safety. Strange how just a change of lighting can completely alter that.

Fairy Tales often feature forests and woodland as their settings, at least in part, ones like Hansel and Gretal, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, and I’m sure others.

Twin Peaks – the whole series had a strange theme running through it, yes, aside from the rather strange overall theme that seems to easily created by David Lynch. But the observation early on of the Douglas-fir made me take note of the trees (as was probably the point), a few scenes in forests, and the log lady, carrying around her special log to tell her the secrets of the what gets seen by the trees. And later we had more sinister forest scenes followed later in the series by scene depicting a portal within the trees, and talk of the white and black lodges. So the trees to me were quite pivotal in that whole scenario, not just for atmosphere, but almost as if they were part of it, or maybe just bystanders to the malevolence, soaking in the darkness and holding on to it.

Lord of The Rings – The Ents, Fengorn Forest and the woods of Lothlórien. Strange areas of ancient forest, under bewitchment and being watched over by things unseen to a normal mortal eye. The Ents being the shepherds of the forest to keep watch and guarded with protecting them.

And in my article about Giants, Trees, and discussing both in A Giant Debate, I have given thought to the idea that the large trees led to something above, like the idea in Jack and the Beanstalk. But now I consider the opposite, that the roots of the trees could have gone as far down as the trunk did above, and became caverns, tunnels and what we would now call an underground city perhaps as found In The Old Underground.

So, is it possible that trees harbour something else, the network they connect to accessing a different energy, a deeper energy from within the earth. One that we as people are infrequently connected to as we are no longer ‘grounded’ as we once were. And maybe it’s an energy that is limited now, with smaller trees on the surface to try and harness it, constantly having their underground network disrupted, interfered with or severed entirely. But despite all the changes and challenges that appear to be on the horizon, just as with the tree roots that still live, nature finds a way…

(c) K Wicks

A reading of my article – A Message From The Future

(c) K Wicks

A reading of my article – The Mamas and the Military Papas

(c) K Wicks

A reading of my article – Making Money From Misery

(c) K Wicks