Sequestered
For the quarantine I have been re-reading Walden. Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 masterpiece manual
of romantic transcendentalism, satire, and self-reliance. Why not, what else is more appropriate now than
sequestered nature-worship. He self-quarantined
in 1845, in his 10x15 cabin on the pond for a year or two. Simplify he said. Actually, he was only a mile from Concord,
and he went home on weekends to have his mother do his laundry, but it felt
like the wilderness of western Massachusetts, and it probably was.
The first chapter of Walden is called Economics, not Adam
Smith economics but personal microeconomics.
Henry talks about all the things he has but does not need, like houses
and farms, animals and imported food.
How the farmer is a slave to his farm, as the shoemaker is slave to his
shop, for generations. How we are all
slaves to our own sustainability, sustenance, maintenance, and entertainment. How most of our concerns are about stuff and
not people, how eventually the possessions possess the possessor.
We have all read this story in high school and loved the
idea, for about ten minutes, but then went back to over-complicate our lives
with college and jobs, friends and family, houses, and toys. We have not come that far. But now we are all forced into our own little
Walden, our own little 100 x150 foot cabins in the woods, with this self-imposed
semi-isolation, where we can contemplate and experience the simple life. All the distractions have been stripped away
and we have been forced to honestly look at our lives and ourselves, who we are.
Simplify
I had a similar Walden notion to remove myself from the
hurly-burly of the real world and simplify my life. I thought of escaping to a cabin in the
woods, or on a lake in the mountains or in a cave in the desert or on a lonely
and anonymous park bench in a big city where no one would bug me and I would
bug no one. But that was too much effort
and counter-intuitive to my desire to simplify.
So, I walked out my back door into the Snyderville Meadow and sat on a
shady low bench besides Willow Creek and swore not to return to reality until I
was good and ready. Simple ain’t easy.
You do not need to go to the ends of the earth to entertain
or remove yourself or give you things to do.
We spend all our time in self stimulation, constantly entertaining and
occupying ourselves. Or travelling the
world, searching for someplace different but are only happy when we find a
place just like home. Wherever we go, there we are. The constant is us.
Simple is more of a state of mind. Simple ain’t easy but it is more than just a
desire to streamline or uncomplicate. It
is an effort to clear the mind and the schedule and to prioritize the real
things we want to do and think and get rid of the clutter of modern times like;
phones, schedules, deadlines, commitments, relationships, what to leave in and
what to leave out and where you have to be at noon. It is also a liberation from the constant
burden of self-entertainment, stimulation, travel and adventure seeking. It is the desire
and ability to recognize and focus on the people that are really important to
us, family and friends, partners and lovers, cohorts and comrades, and to serve
and satisfy those people the best we can. You can only maintain 5-10 friends at
once. Life is too short for fast food and
bad friends.
Self-confinement
We are loving it, my wife and me. We have been retired for ten years so we have
had some practice. Waking up when we
want or when it is warm, with no list or agenda, opening one eye at first light
or at full sunrise to gage the day for what it might become. Then enjoying a leisurely breakfast with
correspondence and conversation, avoiding any contact with the real world for
that is too depressing.
Self-disciplining to coffee, juice, Zinc and an occasional breakfast
chocolate, eggs only every other day and bacon only once a week, no TV or
drinking until 5 but anything else goes, all day.
After my morning douche and yoga practice on the east facing
bedroom deck while singing with my dog Eva, I take my patient companion out for
her morning interval Frisbee session.
Then I look around and let the day come to me. If it is cold, cloudy, or snowing, I’ll turn
the heat up a notch or start a fire and hunker down in the house for a while,
reading, writing, dabbling or fixing and improving stuff. If it is sunny and warm, I will wander around
the backyard or garage to see what calls out to me. Sometimes I will trick myself with a small, predetermined
chore to get me started. I usually
quickly find several other things to do and start mutli-tasking until a natural
priority develops and the less important or non-fun chores fall off until
tomorrow or next week or never.
Today it was removing half a tree encroaching on the
backyard, by hand. My wife Tracey and I
started yesterday with a hand saw on a two foot diameter branch. We took turns sawing the day before, 100
strokes at a time each and then jagging off in between, talking to friends in the
field and playing with the dog. By lunch
we were exhausted and by dinner we were halfway thru. So yesterday we continued with little headway
in the moist dense core of the tree. The
spring buds were emerging so the juices were flowing and we thought of quitting
and letting it leaf out on the branches on the far end of the moment arm, or let
it fill with heavy spring snow to bring that big bad branch down.
But we got impatient so we threw a rope up and over the far
end of the branch and Tracey and I yarded rhythmically on it, up and down,
until it cracked and we ran screaming while it came down with a fantastic
crash, exactly where we wanted it to fall.
Then we took the ax to the downfall, chopping up the big logs and
trimming the small branches off and stacking them next to the fence to build a
more natural branch fence. It was
exhausting so I took a nap and then went for a long ride on my bike. Live deliberately. Then go for a bike ride.
Hank and Ralphie
Henry David would be proud of us because the first thing he
did out at Walden was chop some trees to clear some land. Ralph Waldo Emerson owned the land, but it
was too expensive for Henry to purchase at eight dollars an acre ($300 today)
so he was a squatter, with permission. Thoreau
paid him back by cutting his lawn and trimming his flowers, but they had a
classic haves/have not relationship. When
Ralph visited Henry in jail for civil disobedience (not paying taxes) he asked
him ‘what are you doing in there’ to which Henry replied, ‘what are you doing
out there’.
Henry cleared off 2.5 acres near Walden and planted the
first year, but he was too busy farming the first year and had to sell much of
his food for only 15 dollars ($50). The
next year he planted less than a half-acre that he could farm just ”with his
left hand, at odd hours”. Then he built
his house mostly with stuff that he found lying around for $28 ($1000) and he
was all set. No oxen, nor horses, no
cows, no sheep, no fertilizer, no tractors, no bankers, no contractors, no Home
Depot.
Ralph said, ‘Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond
itself, a world’. Henry David probably
said, ‘yeah/no, maybe not’. Ralphie, the
thinker and innovator, wrote his classics “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” a few
years before and Thoreau, the doer, decided to give his social experiment a
try. Hank was a more approachable voice
for the nature movement than Ralph, less grand-eloquent, so he went to the
woods to write his first book. Henry was
set up in his cabin for life, but he only made it two years before moving on to
something else. He had TADD, Transcendentalist
Attention Deficit Disorder, and he got a little bored.
Evaloution
Today the day came on a little different for us when the
morning warmed quickly under the hot April sun (equivalent to an August
sun). We took our dog Eva for a long
walk in the meadow with the Sand Hill Cranes, eagles and hawks, the gophers,
and the ducks. She left the Cranes alone
on our command but sneaked up and pounced on the gophers repeatedly despite knowing
that no dog has ever caught a gopher in this manner. She was invigorated by the walk, as were we
and we went about our chores content that we had gotten some warm-up exercise
early. We found a dead juvenile hawk
caught under a willow wicker chair in the back yard and marveled at the
intricacies and varieties of all its feathers.
Eva licked it. Evolution is an
amazing thing.
I took Eve out for her frisbee workout with some friends and
they were amazed at how she could burst out after the thrown disk, picking its
flight up quickly over her head and calculating instinctively its trajectory,
complete with a Fibonacci compound curved decay as well as spin, force and wind
effects while keeping an eye on the terrain and any obstacles she should
avoid. She has closing speed to match
Ronnie Lott’s and the peripheral vision of Wayne Gretzky (her eyes are slightly
wider set and on the side of her head, in defense of Wayne).
Breaking quickly to where the disk is going to be, she
sprints at first, with a quick first step to match Karl Malone, but lays off as
she approaches the interception point if she is early, or powers thru like Michael Jordan to finish strong. Instead of
jogging out under the descending Frisbee and catching it as it settles to the
ground like most dogs, she leaps in slow motion 4 – 5 feet in the air and
snatches the disk at the apex, styling nonchalantly with her slightly curled
legs, before sticking the landing and jogging away proud and triumphant.
On the beach Eva can run super-fast in the dry or wet sand,
with the dry sand being much more tiring so she prefers to land in the water
after the catch. She is self-aware and
loves to style in the air and prances as she come back to me for another
throw. There are no bad catches, only
bad throws. I threw one too close to a
fence one day and she adjusted and picked the disk off the top of the fence
like Freddy Lynn pulling a ball off the Green Monster. Eve has never seen baseball, Fred Lynn or the
Green Monster, she just made it up as she went along.
If she were a pro athlete, she would make $30 million a year
and make everyone else look silly. My
friends were suitably impressed and howled and laughed with appreciation. Eva
was not unaware. As many people have said ‘that dog has skills’. And she knows it.
The point is that Eva is always ready for whatever comes at
her. Always ready for frisbee, never
sore or tired, and she always performs at a high level. Always ready for a hike or ski tour, even if
the snow is ten feet deep and it is well below zero and we are out all day. Her coat is both warm and cool, her heat
radiation efficient even though it is only thru her mouth and tongue and I have
never seen her hot, cold, tired, or hurt.
Eve never really needs to eat or drink much, just 25 cents of good dog
food a day and a bowl of water. We have
taught her to ‘camel up’ and drink more before long hikes. She is perfectly designed for whatever comes
and is always game. She is a cattle dog by
nature and a Frisbee dog by training, with a mutt pedigree, so she has energy and athleticism and she demands a
job, something to do, a reason to be, every day. Frisbee is her job, no, her avocation and she
loves it to obsession. She ignores
people and dogs, gophers and food, even bathroom breaks, when she is playing
Frisbee. Her raison
d'être.
Efficiency
How cool would it be if we were that efficient, with no
wants or needs except a purpose and bare sustenance. We could spend all our time just being, like
Eve does, being a dog. Thoreau tried to
show us that it does not take much to be happy, that less is more. I picture him in modern days, a Rastafarian
street person living under the viaduct, or a bearded curmudgeon living in a
desert cave in New Mexico or cabin in Montana.
But he was well educated, at Harvard, ambitious, thoughtful, and
outspoken, and might be like us, living in the material world but fighting the
good fight to simplify while keeping up with the Joneses.
Our collective sequestration would appeal to Henry, as It
appeals to me. I am lucky to be safe and
healthy, wealthy, and wise, or at least three out of four, so I can enjoy my
plethora of free time. They say that
free time is the blessing and curse of the upper and lower class but for a
while it is forced on the shrinking middle class. Some can embrace it, some resist. Some struggle, being only one paycheck or
health emergency away from the poor house.
Some scream irresponsibly, to return to normal and continue our mindless
consumption and pursuit of self-entertainment and something to do, to fire up
the economic engine that trickles up and down and drives everything.
If only we could be like Hank and Ralphie and
Eva and be content to, as they say to; let game come to us, let the day come to
us. This is an opportunity to reinvent
ourselves and the world as we know it. We
could all be more content with ourselves and each other and simplify the world
around us. It is an opportunity to let our
problems solve themselves, as they often do, with or without us, and just sit
back and let the mystery be.
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