Here we have a ready-made community of old friends and ample opportunity to make new ones. I’ve gone back to writing for the local newspaper about issues that really matter to the locals, but rarely make it onto anyone’s radar farther than a day’s walk from here. Above all, since my return, the living landscape of snowy mountain trails and sleepy, icebound rivers has sent me hourly invitations to walk and get reacquainted. I’ve spent a lot of time catching up on the news from the year-round neighbors: fox, rabbit, mouse, muskrat, magpie, bald eagle, coyote, red-tailed hawk, willow, wild rose, cottonwood, deer, elk, raccoon—just to name a few.

The net result has been an onset of severe attention deficit anytime I picture sitting in front of the computer for longer than absolutely necessary. The creek nearby is never the same at sunset as it was in the morning, a fact I feel compelled to personally verify. Many of the itinerant citizens are beginning to return or awaken—robin, geese, skunk, beaver, red-winged blackbirds—and I hate to miss the opportunity to be the first to greet them. The Milky Way is vivid in the sky most nights, and the moon is a lazy and companionable town crier marking the time of the month.

In this setting, a brisk walk feels too fast, and in any case is only possible on manmade roads. Trails are made for stopping and looking—one continuous scenic turnout. Straight lines are an abstraction. If it weren’t for power poles and the angular walls and roof of my house I might stop believing in them altogether. Even the bare willow branches reach sideways in arching yoga poses that seem to deny the very existence of rectitude. It is a meandering, curvaceous, flibbertigibbet world—a state that is highly contagious to wanderers. Old stories tell of travelers who stumble into enchanted groves and fall out of time, forgetting who they are (or at least who they are expected to be by others). Storytellers lay the blame on mischievous fairy folk, but I begin to believe in a less exotic explanation. Up and down, east and west, in summer and winter, the whole world is timeless already and quite content to simply be. This gives off a thoroughly intoxicating fragrance.

But please don’t think I am only talking about this particular style of living in this particular place. I know that most people have no choice but to live in the city. And let’s be honest, most of those would stay where they are in any case. Many of my urban friends think I’m bonkers for preferring starlight to the late-night neon excitement of metropolitan life.

I’m talking about what happens to anyone, anywhere on the planet when you become available and open to having a relationship with the world and with the ground-level facts of your life. Pigeons and potted plants are just as rooted in the timeless now as pine trees and beaver ponds. A tomato vine on an apartment patio can connect you with the living community that provides your food. Running barefoot through soccer field grass will heighten your sense of belonging on the earth and remind you that putting one foot in front of the other—literally—is something you have in common with every other person who has ever lived. I’m talking about a universal way to experience time, people, nature, walking and breathing that is more in synch with true human nature than living at a machine’s pace.

It is also in synch with the future. The fact is, most of the complex systems which isolate us from the earth and alienate us from each other in today’s frantic world are already in steep decline (even if your iPhone still functions for a while). It isn’t hard to justify that claim. We need only consider the fact that the era of cheap oil over for good, clearly evident in the present, prolonged economic crisis and associated geopolitical seizures. Add in the combined stresses of a number of social and environmental emergencies and it becomes implausible—if not impossible—to believe in a future where prosperity continues to be defined as endless economic growth and financial profit. That model is mortally wounded.

If human history is a novel, then we’ve reached the climax, the final turning point in which the protagonists (us) either change or die. We now must grow or suffer unspeakable consequences. This is the moment when we find out if the burning question raised in act one can be resolved in act three: “Will we cease our juvenile infatuation with ourselves and visions of our own splendor and return to balanced relationship with the rest of creation in time to avoid a really unhappy ending?”

This morning, as I walked along a snow-free ridgeline formed by south facing outcroppings of schist and gneiss more than 2 billion years old, I thought, “Of course we can. We possess everything we need to succeed.”

Then I remembered the question wasn’t can we evolve our way into a better future; it waswill we. That’s up to each of us right where we are. I recommend you begin by slowing down and paying attention to things that have always been.

Breathe. See. Love. Give.

11 Comments on "A Walk in the Future"

J-Gav on Mon, 10th Mar 2014 4:00 pm 



I like this guy but he just ends up making me jealous because I’m still stuck in the city …

Beery on Mon, 10th Mar 2014 4:25 pm 



Just another rural=utopia nutcase.

rollin on Mon, 10th Mar 2014 5:36 pm 



Walking is the best way to see the world, as long as you take the time to look around and don’t treat the world as a gymnasium. Each sunrise and sunset is a master work of art. Life moves around you in a rhythm that has been beating for millennia of millennia.

The living generations are the last to see the world as it was and is, the world has changed dramatically in just one lifetime. Too bad most are not even really looking at the world, they just busily hum along with their noses to the grindstone and eyes to the TV. Their ears are for mass media not for bird song or the sound of water rushing in a brook.
Do they even know the great migrations going on around them right now?
Blind and deaf, most people wander aimlessly through the greatest wonders of the world, not even knowing they exist.

Davy, Hermann, MO on Mon, 10th Mar 2014 6:16 pm 



Sorry, Gav, he is describing my life in many ways. I thought you lived in Paris, can’t be all bad in a city like Paris!

Beery, nothing wrong with crazy rural utopia. It is definitely less demanding on global resources than Suburban America!

Sound wisdom Rollin!

J-Gav on Mon, 10th Mar 2014 8:42 pm 



Beery – I don’t really have utopian dreams on any front. There are a few things I’d like to try out if I could get my hands on a little house and little piece of land. But I’m perfectly aware of how hard it is to blend into rural life in France after Paris. If you didn’t have kids in a local school etc many places here will always see you as a foreigner, even if you’ve integrated French ‘culture’ about as far as that can go … There are always some exceptions too though.

J-Gav on Mon, 10th Mar 2014 8:48 pm 



Davy – Not sayin’ it’s all bad in Paris, just that it’s not a place to be when STHTF. Or even right now for that matter. Beautiful spring weather since early March here, really exceptional! What do we get for it in the city? Ozone and pollution peaks. I still like fresh air, creeks, woods, ponds, wildlife and the rest of what I grew up with in Michigan despite my citified existence now…

Davy, Hermann, MO on Tue, 11th Mar 2014 12:56 am 



I spent several summers in the South of France in Biarritz. That area will do well post industrial man.

Makati1 on Tue, 11th Mar 2014 2:43 am 



Living in Manila is not too bad, but I am anxious to get on the farm 50 miles as the crow flies and 4 hours by bus out of the city. I have a small garden in my condo living room at the huge window facing north. I cannot grow veggies but I have been growing fruit and nut trees from seed. There is a native kapok here that is good for things like stuffing mattresses or pillows and can be woven into things useful. (Kapok filling was common until plastics replaced them.)

The farm is 100 meters up-slope from a river that cuts through the Eastern mountain range of Luzon. It is less than 5 miles to the Pacific and I can see it from the top of the hill the farm sits on. There is a small town of about 5,000 between the farm and the ocean that has everything I might need. Our current caretaker is raising pineapples and cassava for us at the present and tends the coffee, chocolate, guava, and other trees that we planted.

I’m getting cabin fever just writing about it. Our plans are to build the farm house next year, after we get the well in this year(hand pump with the option of an electric one later if wanted), the property lines newly surveyed and a fence put up. There is a spring but it slows to a trickle in the dry season and may move down slope when climates change so the well is needed if we are going to have animals.

We think we can be quite comfortable and it will only cost us about $40,000 US. House (800 sq.ft.), well, PV system, and accessories. We decided against putting a road in as the cost for 1/2 mile would be too much. A path for the carabao and cart is all that is needed. We can walk down to the road when necessary. No mailbox. No commercial utility connections. But we do have internet and cell phone access as long as they survive.

Cities will definitely not be the place to be when the SHTF.

Meld on Tue, 11th Mar 2014 7:03 am 



Country boy myself, can’t stand the city. Whenever I go into one I feel like the chap from apocalypto when he gets enslaved and taken to one.

Bizarre clothing, odd tattoos and piercings, loud noises, lack of empathy, materialism overload. It’s a sick sick place. I start to actually feel sick after an hour or so in one (usually Liverpool)

GregT on Tue, 11th Mar 2014 9:09 pm 



You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.

I like you Meld, cannot stand the cities. Within 10 minutes of being in one, my stress level goes through the roof. Give me the sound of the wind blowing through the trees, birds singing, and the smell of fresh clean air, any day.

Pollution, traffic noise, and being surrounded by anonymous crowds of self centred, rude people, is not my idea of living life to it’s fullest. Why people choose to live their lives that way, is completely beyond my comprehension. Judging from the mass exodus of people moving into the cities, we must be in the minority, which suits me just fine.

rollin on Wed, 12th Mar 2014 10:35 pm 



Cities are great, it keeps billions of people from cluttering up the countryside.