Lessons to be learned by dropping out and living in poverty.
 The Rules of the road, while traveling through life.
The people in our lives tell us what to do. They have carved in stone a building of laws.
These tribal laws are past down from generation to generation by word of mouth, as this
bundle of yarns roll, it picks up pieces of useful information.
We as children do not believe that these rules and laws are of much good, we rebel,
wanting to learn for ourselves.
Some children do learn in the first years of schooling, some children learn though trial and
error (Tomas is this example).
Dropping out and living in poverty is a good way to learn these laws the hard way, the
way that makes law understandable. You start out by scratching your butt in the woods,
completely lost in your total darkness. Then you learn to wash the crap off your hands.
Then you learn to build a fire for warmth and light, then you build a shelter for the winters
rain and snows. Pointed sticks from the fire for poking and digging in the earth. While
burning clay in the fire, you burn your hand, you are forming clay into tools. You draw a
smile in the flat clay tablet. You learn to bind wooden branches with vines. Sharp rocks
hurt your feet and you learn to scrape or pound with them. You eat whatever is available
and soon learn that some thing brings an ache to your knotted belly. You choose to eat
whatever does not hurt. In the back of your mind you come to understand the lessons
learned in the schools, the language to speak, the tools to create objects, the ability to
decide.
***
While you are learning, the great greedy machine rolls through the green lights. You want
to stop the machine, slow it down a little, teach it to watch for children. The machine
whines and says that it knows about children, as you quickly move the child out of the
way of this steaming breath.

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Words & Graphics by Tomas