[LMB] OT: if civilization fell

[Terra]

Hmmm.  I've got an odd smattering of skills.  I can make a backstrap 
loom and weave on it (I'd have to team up with the person here with the 
spinning skills since I haven't learned to spin yet).  I lived off the 
grid in a yurt for a time and could definitely construct one if I really 
had to.  I've been a bodyworker and a healer for 15 years now and can 
eliminate pain and radically increase healing speed, and the detailed 
uses of that anatomy training would translate to lots of other emergency 
medicine as well if it had to.  I can bake bread from scratch and know 
how to make a sourdough starter without any prepackaged yeasties, so we 
could have bread if there was an entire farm and mill operational :P  I 
can sew and I can do conventional dyeing.  Given time I'm sure I could 
do plant-based dyeing.  I know quite a bit about midwifery, solving 
nursing problems, baby carrying and parenting in general and teach 
positive discipline which actually translates over into helping adults 
behave better quite well ;D  While the ability to see and read auras, 
interact with energy, counsel those PTSD/trauma and cultivate a quiet 
meditative atmosphere may not have practical use, I imagine the 
psychology of civilization's collapse would make a lot of people want 
spiritual comfort.  Spiritual leadership has always been important to 
pre-industrial societies, hopefully people would find my stuff 
comforting.  I'm a fairly competent horse trainer and rider, so I could 
contribute to transportation.  I know quite a bit about composting.  I 
know how to create a composting toilet - and THAT'S a skill that would 
be in demand when the sewer system collapses :P  I know how to cook 
without grains - and advantage in some areas, a disadvantage in others.  
I know the basics of how to build a skin canoe, though for the yurt and 
the canoe someone would have to teach me to hunt, skin and tan the leather.

Like many here I'd suffer without medication, but a lot of what affects 
me would be much less of an issue with an agrarian or hunter/gatherer 
life style - which is what got me interested in living off the grid to 
begin with.  All the diseases of an ill culture would fade out.

While there is a lot of research that shows that stone age 
hunter/gatherer peoples were healthy and long lived, civilization 
crashing back to the stone age would take generations to crash that 
completely (and most communities would stop the halt at an agrarian 
society, which has proven not so healthy).  Between the starvation, the 
cruelty of so many very sick people in the population currently and the 
deaths of those who wouldn't have lived without modern medicine to start 
with.....I'd be up high in the mountains somewhere for the rest of our 
generation.

Sobering thinking :)

Terra