Danger Rangers

From Life Jacket: The Danger Ranger Handbook by Carole Rae (1982).

Preface

Danger Rangers live life as an Art Form. They create individualized worlds based on their intuitive visions. Change and growth are met with an expectation of miracles and, as a result, miracles become natural resources of a Danger Ranger. To be a Danger Ranger is to be a living example of an extraordinary ongoing creation of Human Art.

Danger Rangers are complete human examples of Fine Art that are alive. Their lives may have nothing to do with the regular idea of an artist who sculpts or paints. What makes a Danger Ranger an artist is the care and playfulness exerted in [the] everyday life process. Danger Rangers are the aesthetic and light-hearted keepers of the planet.

Art for art’s sake means you are doing it for yourself. This is a guidebook for being art. This is a tool for creating new stages. This is a handbook for beginning your own troop. This is a book for those who visualize concepts. This is a book to play with. This is a recipe book for your life pie.

Each Danger Ranger troop is a retraining ground for adults in the practice of outrageous living. It is a living insurance process with the purpose of supporting our friends in living lives that are more expanded, creative, and adventurous.

Danger Rangers is the scout troop you never had as a conformist kid.

Our motto is:

Danger Rangers Dissolve Parameters!

I am writing the Danger Ranger Guide Book to help people create more incredible environments, feel their intuitive ideas expanded into working forms, get beyond survival, and into phases of grace and magic. I want more help in creating a world that feels good, looks inviting, works well, and offers me more protection and freedom simultaneously.

This is your guidebook – made first for myself and some amazing friends – then for you and your friends and in the end for everyone. Quality of life is my main goal in encouraging more people to go towards aliveness. Improving the quality of life in myself is my reason for setting down these principles.

Danger Ranger gatherings are held every four months. At the first annual meeting, all Rangers choose their badges and announce what they intend to work on and how long it will take. The next two meetings are for encouragement and progress reports. The final meeting of the year is a “fly up” ceremony where members demonstrate their processes, do drama, have visual shows, whatever outrageousness that can be concocted. Badges are presented at this time.

Living examples of Danger Rangers:

• Ellie Katz – Playologist
• Gary Warne – Gorilla Grotto Leader
• David Chadwick – Zen Priest
• Betty Dobson – Sex & Pleasure of the New Planet
• Bonnie Sherk – Life environments
• Jim Petrillo – Life books, visuals
• Betsy Davids – Life books, poet

Members of the Danger Rangers (1982):

• Carole Rae – Aesthetic director
• Don Watanabe – Technical director
• Charmian Anderson – Business of the Soul
• Wendell & Lu Phillips – Founding mother & father
• Holly Steil – Visual records
• Sandra Jacobson – Badge designer
• Cedrus Monte
• Dan Kane
• Bruce Honig
• Jon Larson
• Marybeth Whittemore
• Gariyan Butler
• Eileen Growald
• Shali Parsons – Ranger Guide
• Claude Whitmyer – Ranger in the “outer limits”

A Short List of a Few Badges

• Householder Badge – To support “The Complete Package Woman”: mom, business owner, wife, and happy healthy being.

• Flying Up Badge – For those who had been living a heavily grounded life with great psychic limitations. It involved the actual physical act of flying which could be accomplished in a glider, hot air ballon, skydiving, or flying in a vertical wind tunnel.

• Voluntary Simplicity Badge – To reduce your “footprint” on the earth on as many levels as possible. Beginning community gardens, giving your old clothing to homeless shelters, inviting neighbors for a monthly bean supper to discuss tree planting, ride sharing, etc.

• Badge of Courage – Demands the Danger Ranger make a list of three risky changes they plan to make and to send progress reports to five close friends until they have completed those changes.

• Normal Living Badge – A project for the wild child to bring normal living goals back into your life.

• Playology Badge – To encourage women to carry bubbles in their purses for easing a crying child or a depressed elder and other spontaneous acts of joy.

• Clean Up Badge – A project to eliminate clutter from your living or workspace.

• Circus of the Soul Badge – A project to create a ritual or add something new to your life, such as taking on a job as an art project, making life masks with a group of friends, apprenticing to a master to learn from the scut work, take off a workday to hug the trees in a local park, join an improvisation group, recruit a child to act as a guide on your next adventure.

• Breaking Through Badge – For conquering  your worst fears and letting yourself change yourself for the good of yourself. To make a major breakthroughs happen: giving up an addiction, training for a marathon, learning sky diving to overcome a fear of heights, camping alone for several days to experience communion with nature, or shaving your hair off to symbolize a personal breakthrough and face the attention joyously, and so forth

Other Badges:

• I Am the Art
• Wilderness Road
• Endless Fantasy
• Timelessness
• Temple Maintenance
• Walk the Cutting Edge
• Neutral Buoyancy
• Perfect Dissonance
• Make Your Own Badge
  • Create a list of goals to work on that are important & personal. Write them down. Make a badge symbol. Pursue completion.

Principles of Neutral Buoyancy

1. Practice playing
2. Let spontaneity be the leader
3. Be still.
4. Breathe.
5. Let go.
6. Choose aliveness now.
7. There are no rules.
8. Dive and swim.
9. You are in charge.
10. Appreciate the void.
11. Listen.
12. Do less.
13. Be more.
14. Listen to your original heart.

In case of emergency, choose two and proceed with your life