What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

Miles from nowhere

If memory serves, I wrote a bit on our Northeast tour about how unnatural travel has come to feel to me. I am feeling that today. Air travel is the most extreme example, of course, but travel in general is striking me, more and more, as somehow wrong. It’s out of proportion, somehow. Out of human scale. Beyond the animal. To move so quickly over long distances requires a profound disconnection from place and land and air and life. We’re just so used to it now that we hardly notice.

Getting back to the animal has become a theme of mine recently. I want to get back to the animal. I want to be my animal self, in my animal body, sensing the Earth with my animal senses, attuned and aware and connected, in touch and touching, my feet on the ground. I want to step out of the hall of mirrors, the World, the machine, the civilized, the reflexive, the reflection. I want to walk the Earth in human time, on a human scale, in a human body, my human senses in full relationship with the living planet. I cannot do that in an airplane, or on a train, or a ferry, or in a car. I cannot do that at sixty miles per hour.

I want to come to rest. I want to be somewhere, not miles from nowhere. I want to live life at a scale that feels sane to my animal self. And I am not sure that I will get what I want. I just know that that’s what I want.

We live in a time when all our plans are suspect, when all our dreams come with a caveat, when the path before us is so dark, and so full of twists and turns, that we can rarely see beyond our next step, when all our attempts to predict the future fly from our fingers like dice on a table. The old rules no longer work in the world we have created. The perfect Sturm und Drang (of oil and climate and politics and religion and war and overshoot and extinction and economy and environmental meltdown) is blowing harder every day. Tossed about by the laws of physics and chemistry and biology and sociology and Murphy, we’ll be lucky to keep from capsizing, let alone steer the boat to safety. These days are not like any days we’ve ever known.

So I think about coming to rest. I think about life at a human scale. But I do not know if I will get it. It may be that the universe has other plans for me, and that miles from nowhere is where I will stay for some time. I feel like I’ve put myself at service to the Earth. I’m not really sure what that will entail. All I can do is make what moves I can to come to rest, and be open to the possibility that something else may have a say in the matter. What I can see now is to get back home, rest a long, long rest, and get our house on the market.

One more week on the road. And then, that long, long rest…

We woke the morning after the Silver City screening and met Carolyn and Jean for breakfast, as they had to get home. We hung out with Jill for a bit, then headed up to Boston Hill, for a nice walk in the high desert with Jill and John and Lydia and their two dog friends, Daisy and Dancer. From there we went to John and Lydia’s for a wonderful lunch of homemade chili and quesadillas and salad, right after which we did an hour-long video interview in their dining room with Kyle Johnson, for his public access program <a href="http://www.radiofreesilver.c