Pandemic Land Diaries
At two weeks in, we installed our first permanent structure on our land: a 2600 gallon water tank! Off-grid living on raw land has already been a huge test. It’s easy to be in your practice of self-cultivation, healing and growth when you have all the comforts of modern living. It’s much harder when you spend your time and efforts hauling your own water, building and maintaining shelter, getting fuel for cooking and electricity. When you are battling the elements, digging, shoveling, raking, chiseling rock and dirt in 110 degrees heat, when you are so dirty, exhausted and don’t know where you can go to wash your body or your clothes.
You have to truly come to terms with reality, your expectations, your sense of entitlement. I have to constantly ask myself - why am I so grumpy, irritated, dissatisfied? I realize that a lot of my frustration is wrapped up in the comforts that I think I need, that I got used to, that I feel entitled to. This is the biggest test: to shift your perspective (when you are in survival mode!) from the things you lack to the abundance of what surrounds you now. We have our health, friends and family that support us, and we have each other. The most important things in life have never had deeper significance. This huge undertaking has been a product of us reaching for the great beyond. Times of crisis brings us back to appreciating what we already have. Both instincts come from an unexplainable, sometimes unreasonable drive, and it is a delicate and precarious dance to embrace them both.
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It is so empowering to learn how to rely on your body, your exertion and energy that makes your survival possible. When your labor is directly connected to the things you need to live, you realize those things are a full time job. You don’t have time for your own bullshit. Your psychological and emotional gripes, hangups, stressors seem trivial and petty compared to the basic needs required for a human being to live on this planet. You realize how much your stress is fabricated, how much the mind gets caught up in problems that are part of your constructed world.
I have to remember that this is a very unique and special time. The land is in its most raw beauty - it is teaching us, speaking to us, testing us. We will never experience this moment in the journey again.
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Week 3: Building our shelter. You realize that modern urban living is so disconnected from your everyday needs. How reliant you have become to hidden systems of labor and energy that takes care of everything you need to survive - food, water, garbage, sewage - to the point where you never think twice about it.
You are finally becoming aware of what a person needs to survive - not only aware but responsible for every step in the chain. Where does your water come from? Where does your waste go? How do you procure the energy to heat and cool yourself?
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You have to remember the beauty and abundance of being where you are. The simplicity of nature dictating your daily life rhythm. Waking up at dawn, resting in the heat of midday, watching an impossibly neon sunset every night, seeing the moon rise and the manzanitas glowing in the night, sleeping under the milky way. Being in the company of deer, jackrabbits, lizards, snakes, baby coyotes, condors and eagles that you share this home with.
When times are harsh, you have to be more vigilant and more fastidious than ever about being tender, gentle, caring and sweet. At the end of the day you must remember that your greatest resource is each other.
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“You are at the border between one cycle and the next: It is time to ford the river.
This moment is both archetypal and new - it is you that has changed.
When we learn, we influence the future. Because of the growth you have done, you arrive at the same river completely new, with a new motive and new course of action.
The river used to symbolize going with the flow. Now you are able to build a new relationship with the water. Do not simply ride the river but face it, confront it, cross it.
Fording implies danger and risk - do not think you can cross the river without getting wet. But without crossing, we never realize the substance we are made of. “
- Yijing, The Book of Changes
The Wakalu Hep Yo (Wild River) is a 30 minute drive from our property and is one of the reasons we chose this area to call our home. This is a sacred site where the Miwuk people lived for 2000 years. The Miwuk word WaKaLuu means river and Hep Yoo describes an untamed or wild force of nature. The Wild River is set inside a canyon within the Stanislaus National Forest, filled with ancient conifers.
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This is how we survived the heat wave and wildlife smoke - by creating an oasis in the manzanita forest. Full-time outdoor living has really tested our limits and resolve this past week. Sweltering heat was followed by suffocating smoke, and dry lightning storms at night had us ready to evacuate. But with a flattened pad, retaining wall, sun sail, wooden palettes and a livestock trough, you can make important moments of paradise happen. This stock tank is the perfect deep soaking tub! And the trees continue to remind us that our health is tied to the health of our local ecosystem - its ability to provide us with shade, shelter and clean air.
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When you live closely with nature, you are forced to see death as a natural part of existence. Death is all around you - it becomes something familiar that is not separate from life. In our highly controlled and manicured world of comforts, we keep death as far away as possible, until it is the exception rather than the norm. (Meanwhile, our attachment to comfort is a kind of death that doesn’t generate more life.)
Death is not something to be feared, death should be revered. The ancients know this because they performed ritual sacrifices. When we make a sacrifice (an intentional death), the portal between life and death opens; the world of humans becomes connected to the world of the ancestors. A sacrifice is letting go of something you deeply value. You make an offering. Death makes you participate in the cycle of giving and receiving. A sacrifice is letting go and it is also an investment. It is faith that nothing can be created or destroyed. It is this process of exchange that is the nature of transformation.
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Increasingly “work” has become synonymous with identity. Finding purpose in work is less about what I am actually doing and more about who I am becoming - it is identity creation. But when a project fails, when my work doesn’t turn out the way I expected, what does that say about me? And who am I when I am digging ditches and trenches, when I am flattening building pads? Who am I when I am sitting in a backhoe, operating a machine as an extension of my body? The more I am fixated on my identity, the less satisfied I become. Because the self is not a fixed thing - as soon as I am attached to one aspect of myself, I feel that version of me slip away - it is only temporary. The search for the self that is eternal is an elusive one, possibly a futile one. Maybe I simply am just what I am. I work. I participate in existence. That has intrinsic value. That is enough.
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I didn’t know what gratitude really meant until I lived completely at the mercy of the elements - wildfires, smoke, windstorms, lack of water. I’ve come to realize that survival is completely contingent on gratitude. On the hierarchy of needs, it doesn’t seem like gratitude should even have a place, but it is not only essential but functional. Gratitude puts you in a state where you can be present enough to see what is in front of you, to be aware of the resources you have. It is a state that opens up creativity, so you access your problem-solving capacities. If you only see what is going wrong, if you only have complaints, if you are only focused on your needs not being met and the lack in your life, you cannot progress. Gratitude is the basis for how one endures, sustains, and becomes resilient.
Water falls from the sky. Food and medicine sprouts out of the earth. You are born with a body, you did nothing to earn it. Everything we need in life already exists - we spend our entire lives taking. Gratitude is how we participate in the process of exchange. It is the least we can do to acknowledge what is given freely to us.