[Ed. Note from Johanna: Since recording this, the FCC approved Reflect Orbital’s 60-foot mirror in orbit that’ll beam sunlight to Earth at night. Thus proving what I already knew, that Eric is wrong about most things.]

We recorded this a little while back but it’s become especially relevant now with all the fuss on Substack and elsewhere about this platform’s new Pangram feature. If you’re not familiar, we asked AI to describe it, and the first few tries kind of sucked but we kept at it until it sounded pretty good and now I’m hacking it all up and adding my own rambling to it, because that’s what it means to be a writer in 2026 who isn’t so precious about the tools he uses that he insists on raising his own geese in the backyard just to pluck a quill from a grumpy gander each morning just to have a fresh implement for the inkwell.

Curious what Pangram thinks about that last paragraph. Kinda sounds like Grok, I guess. Anyway….

Pangram is an AI detector, and it’s raising questions about what counts as human writing. Either way, we’re using AI now, whether to write or to check for it, and that raises the bigger question of where all these data centers are going to go, which brings us back around to the argument we had on this podcast. (Here’s where AI comes in hard to cook up some copy…)

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Episode summary

We’re off the grid and off the cuff in this one: Johanna and Eric dive into a full-on debate about whether we should colonize space, put AI data centers in orbit, and what happens to the night sky when we fill it with satellites and mirrors. Starting from Johanna’s recent essays—I Don’t Want to Colonize the Moon and Preserve the Night Sky—we ask whether techno‑optimism is helping or hurting a planet that’s already in crisis.

What we talk about

• Why “colonize space” feels like repeating Earth’s mistakes on a bigger stage, from lunar factories to orbital solar mirrors.

• Reflect Orbital’s plan to hang mirrors in orbit to beam light down at night—and why turning disasters and solar farms into artificial daylight feels dystopian when you love the dark sky.

• SpaceX’s proposal for a massive satellite network and an AI computing cloud in orbit, and why Eric is cautiously excited while Johanna sees more planetary risk than reward.

• A scientist-led computer simulation showing a permanent artificial glow to the night sky from satellite swarms, and the potential fallout for birds, insects, food systems and mental health.

• The bigger question: when new technologies make life more “convenient,” are they actually drawing us further away from food, land, shelter and the skills that keep us alive ?

Off-grid context from the high desert

We argue all this from an off-grid homestead in the high desert of New Mexico, where the night sky is part of our daily life and not just a backdrop for launches. Living off grid, we rely on some of the same technologies—satellites, GPS, internet, and now AI—to make this life possible, even as we question their long‑term costs. That tension sits at the heart of the episode: how to love tools like AI while staying honest about data centers, energy, and planetary limits.

Techno‑optimism vs ecological reality

Eric makes the case that big technologies like the space race, satellites, and now AI have historically opened up incredible possibilities, from GPS to long-distance communication that lets us live off grid and still work. Johanna pushes back, asking whether those gains justify the extraction, pollution and disconnection involved—and whether AI is solving anything as important as climate change, cancer, or capitalism itself. Between the arguments, you’ll hear how we each wrestle with hope, skepticism and the desire to keep our literal skies dark.

Related posts and episodes

If you’d like more context on where we’re coming from, you can read or listen to:

• I Don’t Want to Colonize the Moon – on sacredness, space races and why we don’t need to leave Earth to feel awe.

• Preserve the Night Sky – reflection on orbital mirrors, light pollution and what we lose when we erase the dark.

• Start Here – the best place to meet our off-grid family, how we got here, and what we’re trying to build in the high desert.

• How Tos – practical guides and hot tips for off-grid living and more sustainable choices on the ground, where they matter most.

• Archive – essays on climate, uncertainty, and simple living that frame the bigger questions we raise in this debate.

Shortly after we returned home from our 2025 journey, the Dragon Bravo Fire and White Sage Fire burned over 200,000 acres, destroying the historic Grand Canyon Lodge and heavily damaging infrastructure, fundamentally altering the North Rim. It was heart-breaking to watch from afar.

This summer, the North Rim finally reopened under strict fire bans. The ecosystem of the park proved resilient. Many important environmental features were annihilated, such as the only running trout stream, but the fires were considered relatively low severity. The whipping winds that caused treetops to burn, kept the heat away from the soil and green growth is already emerging through the burn scars to heal the forest.

On June 30, 2026, a new lightning-strike fire, the Cliff Spring Fire, ignited below the North Rim and firefighters are currently managing it, holding steady at 171 acres. Due to recent monsoon activity, containment has risen to 40%, with minimal fire activity and no visible smoke remaining. There are no current Park closures, and conditions remain hopeful.

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Our Grand Canyon Travel Diary

Whether you missed this post when it first went live last year, or you are planning your own summer vacation and need some inspiration, here is the full chronicle of our journey:

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The Ultimate Grand Canyon Master list

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We'd love to hear from you: Have you ever visited the Grand Canyon, or is it still on your bucket list? If you've been, what was your favorite view? Let us know in the comments!

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I believe in a bumper sticker. A very specific one from the last century I finally came to understand a little bit late: “Think global, act local.”

It’s common sense to a certain person today. But the cliche held no appeal to me growing up in the suburbs in the 1990s; in that environment the notion of a local community wasn’t a cohesive thing in my mind. What you might have called my community at the time was fragmented between a few neighborhood friends (themselves scattered among houses that were by and large occupied by strangers I never met), family we might catch up with on the weekends, and centered around school friends, most of whom lived several miles away thanks to school open enrollment policies.

This suburban alienation was probably best illustrated in my friends’ favorite weekend activity. Just simply driving around the expanse of the Denver metroplex. Not cruising the mall or the strip or any other popular place where we might see or be seen by peers like millions do in small towns or actual communities. The goal was rarely in search of connection or community. It was just aimless roaming, wandering. For the alienated, there is no destination because it’s assumed to be unattainable.

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The Power of Just Talking to People Doing Things

My adolescent cynicism was pierced a few years later on my first assignment in journalism school. I still remember the name of the first person I ever interviewed for that story — Devear Redden, a volunteer for the Salvation Army in Columbia, Missouri. It was the archetypal basic, fluffy, feel-good news article about the local food pantry in a college town. But putting my name to an article that highlighted an actual positive action in my community at the time may have been the first time I felt a real connection to the word. Or at least it was the first time I noticed or didn’t take that connection for granted.

It caught me by surprise. I hadn’t come to journalism school with the aim of doing much actual journalism—I just knew that the broadcast journalism program would put me on the local television channel for a year or two, and in my slightly delusional and alienated suburban mind, that seemed like a potential path to me becoming the next Conan O’Brien. Although I would remain resistant to the notion that journalism and not comedy or entertainment might be my real calling, the experience of finding satisfaction from a newsroom shift or reporting from the field continued to repeat itself during my time in college.

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Alaskan Radio Changed My Perspective

World events and economics conspired to send me on a path shortly after graduation to one of the most rural and remote places on Earth — the roadless Alaskan Bush. Sight unseen, I signed a two-year contract to move to a village of 700 people that was accessible only by small passenger planes.

To the surprise of many family and friends, I was thrilled. As I made my arrangements to travel to my new home for the first time, I indulged in fantasies of what it would be like to live in an actual community for the first time, not the contrived community of a college dorm or a corporate workplace, but a vintage village set amid a vast wilderness. I imagined myself arriving in town to a fanfare of appreciation; I would be welcomed for my many talents: I could coach the first football team in the history of the village; hold salons on the postmodern literary stylings of Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen; best of all I could start an improv comedy troupe sure to be as beloved as the Comedy Wars crew at the University of Missouri.

Absolutely none of these things happened, even though I actually stayed for 4 years in the village. But I did get a taste of what living in actual community is like. The best parts were even better than I imagined; the worst parts were devastating and made staying beyond the length of time I did untenable. The thing to know here is that the remoteness and often extreme environment of a sub-Arctic Alaskan village act as an amplifier for everything. The highs were higher and the lows were lower. But the overall sense of being part of a community bound by shared geography, history and struggles stuck with me. It felt like something that was missing from my life and maybe more importantly, something that was missing from the lives of many, many others.

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A Valued Voice in the Wilderness

Most of the time I was in rural Alaska, I was at the center of the community as the voice of the local radio station. Alaska still has a robust network of community radio stations that are a lifeline for its many remote communities. In fact, part of my job was to send messages to people at even more remote settlements (very slow satellite internet and echo-y satellite phones were extremely high-priced luxuries at the time) over the air. In between the news of wars abroad and drama in Washington, DC, I would inform Betsy that she had left her colander at Margie’s cabin or some other such big-time breaking news alert.

I finally understood what “Think global, act local” really looked like in practice. It’s easy to dismiss these kinds of mundane small town interactions as quaint, but it’s what community is: mutual aid, solidarity, free association and maintaining a sense of place and identity among the broader chaos of the world.

Stack up all those quaint interactions over years, decades, generations and it can become a strong safety net to catch a community’s individual members when catastrophe strikes, like in the case of the local fishery collapsing or a destructive storm or an outbreak of youth suicides (unfortunately I saw the role community played in reacting to all these scenarios during my time there.)

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Covid-19 and the Collapse of Community

Fast forward fifteen years to the catastrophe of Covid-19. I was no longer in Alaska, but instead in the process of moving off-grid in rural New Mexico. In the early weeks of the pandemic I saw the familiar rallying effect of communities at home and around the world. But it was striking how short-lived that phase of solidarity and mutual aid was, both in our small town community and elsewhere, especially throughout the United States.

At this point several books have been written about both the uneven and lackluster response to Covid, and the sociopolitical polarization that exacerbated it even more.

But one piece of the puzzle that I think remains under-discussed is the collapse of community, in particular of community newspapers, radio stations and other local media outlets since the turn of the century. We know that over 3,200 local newspapers have vanished since 2005 in the United States alone — a tally that doesn’t capture countless other radio and print outlets downsized or consolidated into shells of their former selves.

The result is the disappearance of community coverage, reduced accountability and efficiency of local governments that can fall into bad habits like waste, incompetence or even corruption without a watchdog on the beat. This is to say nothing of the reduction in human and community connections that local media fostered for generations. Radio and newspapers literally bring the voices of neighbors into homes on a daily basis, reducing the isolation and alienation I felt in 20th century suburbs and that we know is more endemic in developed societies today.

Worse, local media has been replaced by algorithmically driven social media that originally claimed to be on a mission to connect humanity, but adopted a business model that instead prioritizes human engagement at all costs; it’s now common knowledge that few things drive that engagement as well as ginning up anger and resentment.

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The Modern Information Diet: We are What We Scroll

The disappearance of local news has left us disconnected from our own communities, and social media arguments around highly charged national and international stories have filled the gap left in our information diets. This is a terrible double whammy in that we spend time yelling at each other about things that rarely impact our actual lives and communities, while spending less time discussing ways to improve the things that do impact us and our neighbors — things we could actually do more about than just shouting online.

This is how I understand the bitterness I saw during Covid; the distrust, the finger-pointing, the uneven and ineffective response.

That response also sent me down a long path over the last several years that led to a sobering conclusion: there is no guarantee anybody is coming to help when you need it most. At least not where I live.

There are good people working every day in our federal, state, county and other local governments, as well as our schools, police, emergency responders, remaining local media and all the other components of our social fabric. It’s all mostly good people. But they are good people within systems that are all too often too ossified, hamstrung, compromised or totally broken to react to all the needs of all the people living day-to-day under the extreme complexity (wonderful as it can often be) of our modern society.

But despite it all, there is still one category of people I do think would come to help to whatever capacity they could if my family really needed it: Our neighbors and the small group of individuals closest to us that I could define as our personal community.

Community is a greatly diminished concept in 2026 America, to be sure, but it is far from extinct. The preservation of some community seems to be built into human nature. We will fiercely defend those closest to us, be it through blood relation, history or even just familiarity or shared geography. The word is empathy and it is powerful, but it doesn’t scale well. We can fret over a sick neighbor while barely considering the suffering of thousands in war or famine-stricken zones on the other side of the world; it’s just how we’re wired.

We’re built for small communities. And while I’m convinced that we’re in a period in which quite a bit is in a state of collapse around us, I’m equally convinced that rebuilding is inevitable and that it will come from the bottom up.

So go ahead, scroll and comment away at whatever culture war or conflict fills up your social feeds. It’s fine to stay informed, but if you want to take real action, you’ll do better to put the phone down and step out your door.

Somebody should come up with a way to put that on a bumper sticker.

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Soaking in the hot springs with friends, we relax into a giddy revelry and whisper the secrets we didn’t know we had, gossip about our own souls, and shout sudden epiphanies into the loud streams of piped in water. In the river, after a long day where my energy is fervent and scattered, I hold to an ancient stone smoothed by years of currents and let the flow wash over me, dispersing the wild particles of my being and cleansing me fully. In the sea, I move with the rhythm of the waves, anticipating their crest and crash, my body softens and I cry into the saltwater merging into the infinite unchartered belly of the oceanic Earth

Water has the power to calm our nerves, open our hearts and cleanse our souls. When we drink water it hydrates cells, regulates temperature, and supports our organs. Water helps our heart pump more easily. Water helps our body function, balance and detoxify. Over half our body consists of water and this aqueous environment is the medium through which nearly all our biochemical reactions occur. We can easily conclude that the element of water has a powerful effect on us—body, mind and soul.

Masaru Emoto’s Water Experiments

Masaru Emoto was a Japanese author who photographed ice crystals formed from water, comparing water that had been exposed to positive and negative words, music, and intentions. He noticed when looking at the photographed ice crystals under a microscope that loving words produced symmetric, aesthetically pleasing crystals, while hateful phrases produced irregular or displeasing formations. His experiments suggest that human consciousness can influence the structure of water.

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Because humans are mostly water, Emoto believed that the water we drink and the water in our bodies is continuously responding to our thoughts, words, and environment, shaping our inner state of being. So negative thoughts and environments create discordant energy while positive thoughts create health and spiritual wellness.

In his book, The Hidden Messages in Water, Emoto wrote that since humans emerged and evolved from the seas, “The memory of life arrived on this earth carried by the soul of water. From this memory, life awoke, the human being emerged.” He also believed that water records information and, while circulating throughout the earth, distributes that information. He writes, “In the process of falling to the earth, seeping into the ground, and then emerging, water obtains information from various minerals and becomes wise.”

Though mainstream science doesn’t support Emoto’s claims, treating water as a living carrier of information is resonant throughout many religions and earth-based cultures.

Water Across Cultures and Religions

Indigenous cultures across the globe use water ceremonies —including sweat lodges, water walks, offerings, and ocean immersions—as a pipeline between humans and the spirit realm, often acknowledging water as a being that hears and remembers. Many Native American nations have creation stories that begin in water. Mní wičhóni or “Water is life” is a phrase in the Lakota language that became a central chant at Standing Rock protests and carries the spiritual understanding that water is the Earth’s blood and the community’s lifeline, not just a resource for extraction.

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At the start of the Jewish bible Genesis 1:2 says, “Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.” Water exists before all else in a state of depth and mystery with a divine essence suspended above ready to begin creation as if concocting a great stew of life in a dark subterranean cauldron. Perhaps this is why rituals like the Jewish mikvah and Christian baptism use water as a symbol of rebirth and renewal. Water conducts the transition from one spiritual state to another.

The Qur’an states “We made from water every living thing,” (Surah Al-Anbiya 21:30) agreeing with the bible that water is the fundamental substrate of life. Daily ablutions treat water as a purifier of both body and consciousness before engaging with divinity. Hindus wash their karma away and send their prayers off into the current of the holy Ganges River, a living goddess

Water Rituals

By creating our own water rituals, we can connect with this life-giving element and all the gifts it has to offer us for spiritual wellbeing. We can reciprocate gifts to this loving element by honoring it through small acts of everyday service and awareness. Below are 8 universal ways in which you can connect and form a relationship with the element of water through drinking, bathing, cleansing and more.

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In this episode, we cover:

• Why the show works as reality TV, and where it feels overly produced.

• The repeated “test the new partner” formula and why it can feel unfair in real life.

• Why communication and playing to each person’s strengths matters.

• What six years of desert off-grid living has taught us about stress, standards, and longevity in a relationship.

Our bigger takeaway:
Off-grid life only really works when both people genuinely want the lifestyle, not just the person they moved there for. We also talk about why resentment is the bigger danger than an “uneven” division of labor, and why a sense of humor matters when you’re building a home and a marriage at the same time.

Related:

• Start Here

• How To’s

• The Mud Room Episode

As a stroke of luck, or misfortune, our EV had a mechanical issue, and we had to trade it in. All they had available was a hybrid, so we were able to test a hybrid as well. I’ve taken all the information we gleaned from our test drives, as well as a whole lot of research and gathered it together in one spot to share with you so you can make an educated decision. In this article, I examine efficiency, gas mileage, ease of repair, cost of maintenance, accessibility, solar power, purchase costs and more. At the end, I share my final recommendations. What’s best for you? Electric, hybrid or gas? Hint: it’s not gas.

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Gas is Over, Let’s Move on Already

The national average for gas prices is currently around $4.00 due to the ongoing war with Iran. This is second to the highest ever spike in gas prices in June of 2022 due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The recent spikes in gas prices remind us of our global dependence on oil. Many factors can cause an increase in gas prices other than war such as natural disasters, supply chain issues, increase in demand, financial markets, price gauging and more.

The hard reality is that our entire infrastructure is dependent on oil—transportation, agriculture, power, construction, etc.-- and when oil prices increase so does the cost of everything. Until the powers that be cease to suck every last penny out of oil that they can and begin to face the hard reality that oil is a limited resource, we will continue to be dependent on oil and the inevitable inflation of its cost, the cost of all goods and the cost to our environment. It’s obvious to us that we need to convert to alternative sustainable unlimited resources and fast, but our government is stalling. The oil and auto industries are powerful incumbents with deep lobbying capacity, slowing down measures that cut oil demand or refit transit and land‑use. It’s business as usual in the United States where profit often takes precedent.

So, even though our entire infrastructure supports gas fueled cars, they are the least desirable option for cost, environment and stability.

What’s up with Electric Vehicles?

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Celebrating the change of seasons is an essential part of my nature-based spiritual practice. Whether it’s a solstice, equinox or one of the cross-quarter days in-between, I always like to do something special that is in alignment with the spirit of the season. Summer solstice is a joyous holiday for me, marking the start of the long hot days of summer.

Summer for me means playing in the river, camping, hiking and backpacking (my favorite summer activities), barbeques, outdoor music, eating outside (love this, especially at restaurants), summer dresses and loose flowy clothes, fireworks, my garden (even if rabbits have eaten most of it this year), the buzz of hummingbirds and bees, wildflowers, butterflies, skinny dipping in alpine lakes, outdoor art fairs and flea markets, the farmer’s market, yard sales, weddings, eating fruit from the vine or tree, salads and cold soups, walks late into the evening, dancing with friends, and family travel.

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Summer is rambunctious, abundant, bright and full of energy. Some years I’m not ready for it, as I wrote last summer when I was feeling like slowing down instead of speeding up:

But this year, I’m feeling more ready for the summer season. I want to call in more energy into my body in a way that is new for me. As someone who grew up with undiagnosed ADHD (especially as a girl) I was taught over and over again that I was disruptive, talkative, wacky, crazy, too loud and too much. I grew to believe that avoiding humiliation, getting in trouble, shame, being made fun of or not being taken seriously, meant that I needed to be cool, calm and collected. A lot of that naturally unregulated, uncontrolled energy that I had as a kid got suppressed and manifested in anxiety as an adult. But now I’m ready to make friends with that energy again and what better time to do so than in summer!

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Create Your Summer Solstice Ritual

Rituals are essential to my practice as longtime readers already know. Our culture is filled with rituals from our daily practices to big life rites-of-passages to holiday celebrations. Sometimes they follow a traditional lineage, sometimes we make them up.

I invite you to make meaning out of this weekend by creating your own ritual. It can be 5 minutes long or 5 hours long. First, figure out what your intention is, your prayer, or what you wish to call in.

For summer solstice, I am calling in silly, playful, wacky, loud, active (and maybe even sometimes a little uncomfortable) energy! Perhaps take 10 minutes to journal about what you want to call in for summer solstice. Are you feeling a little slower like I was last year (read above link for ritual ideas)? Or do you feel the building energy of the season? What would be the perfect medicine for you right now in this season of the year and of your life? Take some deep breaths and write from your heart.

I recently listened to mythologist Michael Meade’s Living Myth episode 489 Rituals to Transform and Renew. I really appreciated this quote, “The way I'm talking about ritual, it intends to change things. Healing is a changing that makes things whole. Awakening is a changing that change the level of understanding in a person or a group's life, and so the most meaningful rituals involve transformation and change. And for that to happen, there has to be an awareness and an acceptance of the sense that we can begin a ritual having some idea of what we're doing, but if it's a ritual of transformation, we will encounter a time when we don't know what to do, and or a time when something enters that we had not imagined at all, and that's the thing we were intended to encounter.”

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Ritual can be transformative if you allow yourself to deepen into a relaxed state (like “the zone”) where time fades away and you feel fully present with the moment. What are some things you like to do in summer that put you in “the zone”? That may be creating art (maybe build an Altar to the Earth), going for a forest walk, cooking for friends, playing music, yoga, running, building, decorating, gardening, etc. Any of these can be a ritual when given intention and a little bit of structure—a beginning, middle and end.

Meade suggests using a poem as an entry point to the ritual. You can peruse through these from the Poetry Foundation and see if any call to you. Or perhaps you already have one in mind. I like this one by Joseph Stroud that reminds us that there is darkness within the light and the two are never absent from each other:

Night in Day

The night never wants to end, to give itself over
to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.
Even on summer solstice, the day of light’s great
triumph, where fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun—
we break open the watermelon and spit out
black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass.

But this one by Alix Klingenberg might be most befitting for me this year, calling back the fairy that I was born to be:

The Midsummer Fairy

The Midsummer Fairy wakes after dark,
on the longest day of the year,
to share her wisdom and mischief with me.

She places plums in my pockets
and teaches me new ways
of playing human for another year.

We share our truths
and call them fiction,
we sing the same song
in our heads.

We dance wildly together,
under the strawberry moon,
while the trees pretend to sleep.

Initially I was considering planning a party with friends with cacao and a bonfire, doing some drumming and trance, but that didn’t pan out. Then I thought, well I have to do something! So, I was going to go to a Solstice breathwork class because I love breathwork and it is certainly ritualistic. But in the end, I decided that time alone is actually what I want. A bonfire at sunset, my drum and a song, sun tea and whatever play wants to come through me spontaneously. Your ritual might not be exactly what you envision but what’s important is that it feels authentic to you and aligned with your intention.

If you open with a poem, find a way to close it too. I like to end rituals with a moment of gratitude for everything in my life the dark and light, and all the support and resources I have in place.

Wishing you a very merry summer and a wonderful weekend whether you’re partying with friends or chilling out at home!

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More Ways to Ritualize Summer Solstice:

“Midway upon the journey of our life,
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

--Dante Alighieri’s Inferno

My era of being lost in the wilderness began with the most ridiculous instance.

My friend and I hiked six miles up a mountain to an alpine lake and set up camp. I headed into the trees to gather wood for a fire. My loyal dog, Codee, by my side. I walked about picking up sticks without paying much attention to my surroundings. After about ten minutes, I looked up and realized that I didn’t know how to get back to camp. I looked to my dog, a collie--a breed well known for having a great sense of direction--and asked her to show me the way but (I would learn during this era) Codee could only show me the way back if I turned around to go back. Since I had been wandering in circles, I wasn’t even sure which direction I originated from.

Quickly, the panic set in. I called out my friend’s name in hopes that she would hear me and call back so I could relocate camp. But the wind was too strong for my voice to be heard over it. My heart pounded in my chest. My stomach churned. I began to imagine the scenario in which a search party would have to be sent for me. How long before I was found? My ears burned. I wanted to puke.

But somehow, I had the gumption to slow the panic long enough to look around. Up above was the mountain peak. Relief settled in. If I walk toward the peak, I will walk near the lake and find camp. That’s exactly what I did, soon coming out of the forest (I wasn’t very deep after all) seeing the lake, and figuring out where to go. I admonished myself for being so stupid. I was so close to camp, all I had to do in the first place was simply look up.

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The Pathless Path

Little did I know that this small event would set off a series of events in which I got lost in the wilderness. The panic of being lost echoed in my rib cage and settled in my lungs. It became a fear of mine that I would have to relive until my initiation was over.

Kim Krans from Wild Unknown in her Archetypes deck writes, “Such is the magic of The Forest. It requires first that you enter it, and then that you get lost within it. You may think there is a path to lead you straight through, but soon enough you’ll be on what is known as the pathless path…You’re on an adventure now and there’s no turning back, so embrace the dim light and moving shadows. Whether literal or imaginal—brave the forest and get lost getting found.”

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The Start of My Mid-Life Initiation

A few months later, I would turn 45 years old. The friend I was backpacking with would betray my trust, causing an end to my business of ten years, as I decided to let it go instead of pursuing it through a pandemic that had recently begun. I was unknowingly entering perimenopause. I recently needed farsighted glasses for the first time in my life. Within the year I was diagnosed with ADHD. I had entered midlife.

That moment in the forest was the threshold marker for the path ahead that included ego death after ego death as I let go of my dreams, ambitions, hustle and all the other trappings that I created for external validation. Though I would come out of the forest eventually, I had many trials ahead to get through.

Midlife was the inner core of my initiation, but the wilderness was the outer landscape. I had to get lost to emerge as my new self.

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Get Lost to Get Found

The next time I was lost was in the Nambe Badlands when I decided, on my way home from a few days on spiritual retreat (when one is most ungrounded), that I would wing it without a map. I made a wrong turn as I entered the canyon and after a mile or so, I realized that landmarks were all foreign to me. Codee was with me, but my instinct was not to turn around and retrace my steps; I thought for sure I could find a faster way out. But when I turned on my phone to find a map, I realized that my battery was almost dead. The familiar feelings of panic from being lost arose in me, as if easier to access because I already knew them. Memories of that time in the forest a year prior quickly resurfaced. When I looked around, everything looked the same—miles of desert and tall rock formation ridges with more ridges beyond. I berated myself for getting lost once again. Feelings of destitution overwhelmed me. I called Eric with the last bit of juice on my phone. If I’m not home by dark, come find me, I told him.

Eventually, I fought through the short breaths and tightening chest of panic and convinced myself to turn around. I had walked a long way out and it would be a long way back, but it was the only way. As soon as my direction rotated, Codee took over and guided me back to where I made the wrong turn. As I waded tired through the desert, hopefully toward my car, I cried tears of frustration and overwhelm. I prayed to be found and relieved of my travails. When the car came into sight, more tears came, this time of gratitude.

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The Long Journey

Though I knew at this time in my life that I was going through a transition, I did not fully understand what was happening. I couldn’t see the forest for the trees (pun intended). I had already lost many of my old friends and moved from my house in town to one off grid and remote. My daughter started high school. My interests became less about career goals and partying and more spiritually based; I spent long hours meditating, practicing energy work and yoga. I was amid losing my old self, but it would be a long while before I came out of the woods.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes in Women Who Run With the Wolves “It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires. It is never a mistake to search for what one requires. Never.” Midlife is a time when we are releasing our old selves in search of who we are becoming. We are recovering intuition, voice, desire, and buried identity. But we must get lost to be found. And though it is scary, it is necessary and worthwhile. Getting lost in the wilderness is a metaphor for leaving an outdated identity behind so someone wiser, more grounded, balanced and authentic can emerge, but for me, it was more than a metaphor.

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Rites of Passage

A year later, I understood that I needed a purposeful wilderness initiation or the Universe would keep throwing me into uncomfortable situations whether I wanted it or not. I decided to do vision fast through the School of Lost Borders. John Davis, PhD writes on the website’s blog, “Across time and in countless ways, people of many cultures have gone into the wilderness to mark life transitions and seek guidance. They sought closeness with God, the Mystery, or a higher self...The core of the form was clear: leaving the ordinary world, crossing a threshold, and returning with a gift and a task… In general, people seek wilderness rites of passage in times of significant life transition or to complete life transitions begun earlier but not completed… These practices facilitate ego-transcendence and an opening to spirit. In doing so, they also bring healing and renewed connections with lost or abandoned capacities for guidance, vitality, and joy.”

The vision fast took place in the Colorado wilderness and was highly formatted with a group and guides, including multiple councils and setting a strong intention. Part of the process was to go out into the forest the day before and locate where your camp would be for the three-day wilderness fast. I had looked at a map ahead of time and had an idea of where I wanted to go but quickly ended up walking in a different direction.

I was carrying a gallon of water with the intention of leaving it behind at my spot. I ended up travelling much farther than intended and decided to circle back along the valley floor looking for someplace closer to base camp. No place I passed seemed like a satisfactory location for me to set up camp. So, I kept walking. But after a couple of hours, nearing the time of our expected return, still carrying the water, I realized that I had no idea where I was.

I looked around for landmarks and although I recognized them, I still wasn’t sure which direction I needed to head to return. My path evaporated. Once again, panic, my old friend, set in. I was sure I would die amongst the trees, lost forever. Codee was not with me this time. There was no retracing my steps. I circled in place, crying with physical and emotional exhaustion. How could I have done this again!

I decided to try something different this time. I sat down and did my best to calm myself. I took deep breaths. I rested in the mystery. I listened to the birds and felt the ground solid beneath me.

A few minutes later, I spotted a length of spine perched on a log and recognized it as something I had seen before close to base camp. I was found! Relief showered over me. Later, I found a campsite close by, imperfect but it would do. I spent three terrifying, inspiring, challenging and transformative days fasting in the woods

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Rest in the Mystery

Each time I got lost in the wilderness was an initiation, whether I realized it or not. Each time, I was ready to be found again in my life. Never an easy initiation but each time I learned to let go of the fear just a little bit faster and return to my true, calm and centered self.

That was three years ago and the last time that I was lost in the wilderness. Since then, I use maps and a GPS tracker and make a conscientious effort to turn around and see where I came from, especially where trails split. I no longer wing it. I pay attention as I move along the path, noticing where I am at each turn. Most importantly, I don’t panic. If I am disoriented, I collect myself and retrace my steps. Yes, this is because I am more grounded now. I know who I am and I trust myself. I still am not sure where I am going, but it’s okay. I am comfortable in the mystery, and I know I will find my way eventually when the timing is right.

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I’ve been recalling my pregnancy a lot recently. Perhaps it’s because my “baby” just graduated from high school last weekend. Perhaps it is the new growth of late spring.

I remember how much I loved being pregnant. Our pregnancy was not intentional. We had been married six months and were a few days away from leaving for our 6-week honeymoon backpacking around Central America when I took the test to confirm why my menses still had not appeared. I cried from the shock of the unexpected as much as from the joy of it. We scrambled to figure out how to tweak our honeymoon to suit our new circumstances. But there was no question in my mind that I wanted a baby. I always wanted to have a baby.

I wanted to experience being pregnant. I had a female body after all and struggled with painful and disturbing menstrual cycles my whole life, I might as well put it all to use. I also love to live life to the fullest and experiencing childbirth seemed to me like one way to do that.

Travelling pregnant in the Yucatan, Guatemala, El Salvador and Belize, proved to be difficult. We could only take short bus rides because I constantly had to pee. Even then, I still had to embarrassingly ask the bus driver to pull over for me sometimes in far out locales making the whole bus wait for me. Gratefully, the people were always very kind and understanding, but it was not lost on me that pregnant in Spanish is embarazada and sounds very much like embarrassed.

I also could not eat beans and rice and was always searching for a burger. I ate my first burger in nearly 10 years in Guatemala. I even climbed a volcano while pregnant.

Volcano

I climbed a volcano today
to give you fire. Fearlessly
because the molten river crumbled 
beside me, my rubber soles 

immobile and melting over 
hollow black rocks, my lungs burning 
from the smoke pyre that billowed
out of the livid mountain core. 

Over my shoulder, the sun set 
in lava and plum hues and the 
darkness turned the crust lip of peak 
to shadow. Your father held my 

hand as he guided me blind back 
down the steep trail, night air 
cooling the sweat from my body.
You, a flimsy pea, in abdomen 

forming organs and spine, climbed 
a volcano today. You will have 
fire, to breathe, to spit, to 
stand on, unflinching and bold.

From my poetry chapbook Gestation (Finishing Line Press, 2020)

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The Magic of Pregnancy

I was very active and loved to go hiking for my entire pregnancy until the very end when I had to go on bed rest for a few weeks and then I loved to nap beneath the apple tree along the river and dream of the little being brewing inside of me. As I grew more rotund, people gave up their seats for me on public transit and told me unabashedly how beautiful I was. I felt beautiful and special. I felt magical. I was doing the most magical thing in the entire world, growing a human inside my body. I was mystified by my amazing body that was built by my mother who was built by her mother and so on forever to the beginning of time. My body made room for creation within it as if this space was always there, always waiting to be filled with life.

Pregnancy is truly magical. And though these last few weeks have made me nostalgic for those times as my daughter prepares to leave the nest, I have also been able to reflect on all the ways in my life that I continue to be pregnant with the magic of creation.

Creative Pregnancy

As a writer, I feel the essays, stories and poems growing inside of me before I ever put them on the page. This essay, for example, has been building in me through meditation, imagery and sensations in my body, before the words even formed. During this time of gathering and distilling, there has been a magic circulating about me. Tiny particles of what wishes to come into being circulate around my aura, waiting for me to grab onto them and draw them closer.

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The same is true for when I create a new art piece or curriculum for a new course or yoga workshop or when I upcycle a piece of furniture or plant in my garden. When something is coming into creation through me, my spirit, my mind, my body, I am pregnant with creation. Sometimes I am pregnant with this new manifestation for years, sometimes for only moments before it burst out of me. But no matter how long the gestation is, this is a magical time of pregnancy, the moment right before and during birth when creation happens.

Maybe it’s not as obvious as a big round belly, but I do believe that people can tell. People close to us and sensitive ones and fellow creators, they know. They sense that something is developing within us, though perhaps they cannot name it. When we are in a state of creation, people notice all the ideas and potentials orbiting our aura like a shining light of possibility. Just as a pregnant woman shines.

What is pregnant in you right now? These weeks leading up to Summer Solstice are so full of magic and potential, vibrant with pregnant energy. What are you ready to birth? Sense what is circling you, asking you to call it forth and birth it into the light. I’m so excited for this moment.

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Wisdom of Birth Deck

One thing I helped to birth this season is the Wisdom of Birth oracle deck. I was a doula of sorts, assisting two beautiful women, a birth doula and a mom, who had the idea to create a deck that could support women in pregnancy and birth. When they found my collage art and invited me to be the artist for their deck, I was more than thrilled to be a part of the project. It took many years to come to fruition as all the multiple parts of the project had to align but the wait was well worth it.

Just as in real pregnancies, creative pregnancies that are long past their due date can be risky. Symbolically, our creations can go stale and fail to launch. But these two women were not afraid of letting their baby gestate as long as needed. Sometimes that is true in creation, sometimes we need a long gestation period, and we must trust the process no matter how long it takes. I am glad they did because it has been a beautiful success.

The Kickstarter launched last month and was successfully funded with over 200 funders. If you did not get a chance to pledge, no worries, they are keeping it open a few more days so that you can still receive some of the rewards like prints and candles with my art on them and of course the deck, which includes all 78 cards with original digital collage artwork, gold foil trim, the guidebook with prompts and a tarot key.

Go to Kickstarter

You don’t have to be pregnant to use this deck. The prompts, images and words can easily translate to creative pregnancies and all the things you are birthing. You can use the questions in the tarot key as writing and art prompts.

If you are interested in my poetry chapbook that I wrote while pregnant with my daughter, you can find that here.

In the spring, my daily walks are longer, more frequent and later into the evening. My eyes are often down and searching the forest and desert floors. I’ve been obsessed with wildflowers since moving to the Mesa. Not the names and classifications, not even the colors and beauty. I’ve been obsessed with the particular recipe of seasonal climatic adjustments that are so perfectly suited for their special appearance each year.

This year I was surprised to discover that the little orange globe mallow buds were the first to bloom, even before the Indian paintbrush. This simple and strange timing nearly blew my mind. How did this happen? And yet, I shouldn’t be surprised at all. The wildflowers never fail to amaze me.

Why did the tansy aster bushes that the bees love and grow out of the gravel in my yard explode last year? Was it the long drought of winter that called these resilient beings back?

How come two summers ago the mullein appeared in full force like guardians to the ether world? Their tall stalks suddenly arrived from seeds planted two years prior. Why didn’t they appear again last year?

Three years ago, there were bushels of mauve milkvetch everywhere across the forest floors. Was it the amount of rain that arrived in May with the weeks of dry cool days? Why did the sunflowers explode there years before. Was it the unbearable weeks of heat followed by massive monsoon rains?

What’s the precise timing of rain to sun to season to heat that causes one flower to flourish and another to stay dormant.

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I think I love these ideas so much because they so deeply and simply reflect my own psyche. Why am I so passionate about collage or poetry or running for several years and suddenly lose interest? Why am I always changing and altering in inexplicable ways? How does the season shift within me? How does culture, hormones, companions, all affect what blossoms within me?

Nature gives permission to always be changing. In a society that rewards consistency and mastery, this programming has been embedded in us to believe that is the “right” way to do things. But my constitution disagrees. My right way is to follow my interests, my heart, the weather perhaps. Like wildflowers, I bloom when the conditions are right to do so and no number of external forces can change my perfect timing.

What about you? Are you like wildflowers? Or do you prefer the consistency of a domesticated bloom?

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Take it easy,

Johanna

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Can you imagine a future where a company could turn the lights on in the night sky, essentially shining out the dark? Or a future where there is no longer a truly dark sky? Well, this isn’t science fiction, this is happening. Satellites and other artificial objects in Earth’s orbit, including proposals for new orbital illumination systems, will add to the already declining darkness in our night. Without dark, all living beings on Earth will be thrown off our natural cyclical rhythms with a dangerous upset to life as we know it, including stressing our food supplies and causing illness.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I don’t want to colonize the moon. A few weeks prior to that, I wrote about living in cyclical time, which includes our internal circadian rhythms, the way our body has evolved since our ancient ancestors reacted to night and day, letting us know when to sleep, wake up, mate and menstruate.

In recent studies, researchers including physicist Miroslav Kocifaj have shown through a computer simulation that sunlight scattered off satellites and orbital debris may now be adding a permanent artificial glow to the night, brightening the sky by at least around 10 percent above natural levels, enough for astronomers to class it as light‑polluted.

SpaceX wants to launch a million additional satellites to create an orbiting AI computing network.

Reflect Orbital, a California startup, wants to hang mirrors in orbit and use them to bounce sunlight back down to Earth. Their plan is to dial that reflected light anywhere from a soft full‑moon glow to something closer to full noon. The pitch is that you could keep solar farms humming after dark, or flip on an artificial day over disaster zones at night.

Ruskin Hartley, who runs DarkSky International, wrote on LinkedIn in response to the proposal, “…this concept fundamentally conflicts with responsible lighting principles and poses serious risks to wildlife, human health, astronomy, and the shared nighttime environment. The night sky is not empty space. It’s a global commons — and decisions like this demand transparency, science-based review, and public accountability.”

The presidents of four international sleep and circadian rhythm societies, along with 2,500 researchers, are asking the U.S. government to take a hard look at these proposals and issue a full environmental review before anything moves forward.

Charalambos Kyriacou, a chronobiologist at the University of Leicester and president of the European Biological Rhythms Society, in recent coverage about proposed reflective satellite mirror systems and orbital lighting, along with other society presidents, warned that altering natural light–dark cycles from space could disrupt biological clocks that regulate human sleep and hormone production, and could also disturb animal migration, seasonal plant behavior, and marine phytoplankton that support ocean food webs.

If these proposals go through (or eventually many more like them) the trajectory of our future will shift subtly but immensely.

Why Darkness is Necessary for Humans

Around the world, sleep would get shorter and lighter if nighttime darkness is reduced. Human bodies rely on dark nights to trigger melatonin, keep sleep cycles stable, and coordinate hormones that affect metabolism, mood, immunity, and even cancer risk. Take that darkness away and you get more insomnia, metabolic disease, depression, and a general hit to health and resilience over time. Rates of obesity, diabetes, mood disorders, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and immune problems will slowly climb, because chronic circadian disruption will become the default mode. By midlife, most people will need medication to sleep and then more to wake up. The already strained mental health care system will sink under the load of chronic anxiety, depression, and attention problems linked to scrambled bio-clocks.

Why Dark is Necessary for Other Animals

Non‑human animals lean on the same light–dark signals even more so. Migratory birds use stars, polarized light, and a reliable dark sky to navigate. With lighter skies they will fly off course more often, collide with lit structures, or arrive at the wrong time for food.

Nocturnal species use dim skies to migrate, hunt, hide, and mate. When nights get brighter, they move at the wrong time. Predators will be able to see better for more hours, and prey will have fewer safe windows, causing them to avoid once‑safe areas entirely. Behaviors built around darkness will shift entirely. Some species will adapt in warped ways, but many will decline.

Amphibians call and mate less under bright nights because light scrambles the cues and conditions they evolved to rely on for reproduction. Most frogs and toads call at night to attract mates, and they time that calling with darkness, temperature, humidity, and lunar phase. Artificial light at night interferes with these cues, which cuts down on actual calling time. When amphibian populations thin, they will take insect control and food for other animals with them.

Insects are drawn to light, die around it in huge numbers, and that ripples up the food chain to bats, birds, amphibians, and everything that eats them. Over decades, that means quieter nights without the songs of crickets and katydids, fewer pollinators, and disrupted food webs that support the ecosystem as we know it.

Why Dark is Necessary for Plants and Plankton

Plants also sense day length and darkness. Extra light at night can confuse seasons, shift flowering times, and throw off the balance between plants and the insects that pollinate them. Light also seeps into the ground. Soil microbes reshuffle under prolonged illumination and weaken plant health over time.

In the oceans, marine phytoplankton sets the base for the food chain, and changing their light environment can change when and how they grow, which effects fish, seabirds, and fisheries. Artificial light spilling from coasts, platforms, ships, and orbital reflections penetrates surprisingly deep into the sea. Phytoplankton, tuned to day–night cycles, get a longer period of light almost everywhere near human activity. When light increases, some groups bloom more often or at odd times, including species that fuel harmful algal blooms and low-oxygen dead zones.

Zooplankton, which usually rise to the surface to feed under cover of darkness, will start to avoid lit layers, or shift their migrations. Fish that depend on those nightly movements will lose a predictable food source, and the timing of entire marine food webs will be thrown off.

How Does This Effect Our Food Supply

With lighter skies, our ecosystem will get weaker and more prone to climate stress, pollution and new pathogens. Food webs will have fewer species and a lot less resilience. As biodiversity drops, agriculture becomes more vulnerable to droughts, floods, pests, and disease outbreaks, and yields get more erratic over time. As more species disappear or decline, we will lean harder on a few global staple crops and livestock, which will themselves be more exposed to new pathogens and climate shocks. That means less nutritional diversity in our diets and a higher risk that one blight can take out a chunk of the food supply.

Keep Our Future Dark

All this adds up to a less functional habitat. More chronic illness in humans, less stable wildlife populations, weaker pollination and pest control, and food systems that face yet another stress on top of heat, drought, and pollution.

Just a bit more light at night can change the way every living being on the planet has evolved to operate. Imagine a future where you can no longer see the Milky Way Galaxy or the constellations that our ancient ancestors created great mythic tales about and children can only see photos of what the night sky used to look like long ago.

Sign DarkSky’s open letter opposing Reflect Orbitals proposal

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What is Deep Listening

There are many ways to connect with the natural world around you such as sit spots and forest walks but to truly be in sync with the living world, feel the sensation of communing with your environment, and be able to practice animistic nature communication, you must learn deep listening.

Deep listening is a spiritual concept represented across cultures that means to listen with your whole body to what is said and what is unsaid, listening to people’s hearts, listening to the heart of the land and listening to the heart of connection with all of existence. Deep listening is inner quiet, still awareness, and waiting. Deep listening happens when we turn off the chatter of our minds and drop into a softer attention, allowing us to receive intuitive wisdom from outside of ourselves.

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My Experience Deep Listening

During the pandemic when we first moved off grid and my nervous system was dysregulated, I spent hours walking the public lands around my house through the sagebrush and into the forest. At the peak of my nature walks, I often stopped to sit with a tree. Without knowing it, I was practicing deep listening.

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In these unprecedented times, community becomes more necessary than ever. We need community that can support us physically and emotionally in our everyday lives and in times of disaster. No one can do it alone.

While Eric and I choose to live off the grid to create more independence from corporate and government utilities, we also do so to increase our connection with our natural resources and take them less for granted. We now understand that the stereotypical off-gridding homesteader who is completely independent of all others no longer stands up to scrutiny. We are more aware than ever of our interdependence with the land and the people who share it. And while we recently added a greenhouse to extend our growing season to year-round, we are not under the assumption that we can grow all our needs.

Even if we were to go back in time to the Wild West of the 1800s, no one was able to live completely independently. Even the Mountain Men came back to town to resupply occasionally. Even the ranchers were trading beef for blankets.

Our ancient ancestors lived in tribes because they were necessary for survival. Multiple people with multiple skills were needed to hunt, gather, build and create. This still holds true. Community is integral to our survival.

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What is Community

Community takes many forms but first and foremost I want to make sure that we include all of the living world as our community. We live in an interconnected environment called an ecosystem where everything in the web of life is dependent on everything else and that includes us. We have the power to nurture or destroy our ecosystem. Globally, we are destroying our ecosystem by extracting natural resources at an unsustainable rate. Locally, we can work toward stewardship and a regenerative culture that aids our ecosystem and keeps it in balance. It is important that we recognize the more-than-human world in our community so we can treat it with the same respect we may treat our human community.

For most of human history, community has commonly been considered the people in our local area. Pre-internet, when we spoke of community, we meant the people we bump into at the post office, grocery store, apartment building, place of worship or at work. Classic sociology describes this as people bound by close, face‑to‑face ties in a specific place.

Obviously, this has changed with mass-communication where the world has become global, and “friends” are people who you accepted a social media invite from. The word community has become much looser due to the emergence of online communities. Some online communities stay earnest and true like the one I found on Substack, but many others are hollow forms of commodification where the word “community” stands in for “audience” or “customers.”

At its core, community is still a group of people linked by social ties, sharing common perspectives, and engaging in joint action.

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Online vs. In-person Communities

For the most part, with an online community you can choose what you want to join and what you don’t want to bother with. That’s not usually true for communities in-person. You can’t choose your neighbors, coworkers, family members, etc. You are community by proximity. You can’t turn off your computer when you don’t want to deal with a member of your in-person community acting badly. In-person communities are more challenging. You must be willing to deal with the entire human with all their idiosyncrasies and social habits. You aren’t given the pleasure of a little box on the screen who only shows you what they want when they want.

Online communities are obviously easier to participate in, to find your people and to create boundaries. Maybe that’s why more people are choosing online communities to in-person ones. Screen time, packed schedules, and hustle culture make in-person communities more difficult to create and navigate. Frayed local ties means that online spaces are the easiest default mode for socialization. In our modern world, we get more practice hanging out online than talking to our literal neighbors.

But online communities are not feeding our souls the way face-to-face human interaction does. The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an “epidemic” and noted that about half of American adults say they feel lonely. Loneliness is closely tied to the loss of eye contact, physical touch, and the easy back‑and‑forth of in‑person conversation that is hard to reproduce online. In national surveys, about 73% of people said that they blame technology as a major contributor to loneliness.

Online communities aren’t going to give us the socialization or shared resources that we need to thrive or to survive.

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Community for Safety

Living remotely, Eric and I are aware of what it feels like not to be able to depend on government services to quickly respond in case of an emergency. Unfortunately, it might take a while for the police, fire trucks and ambulances to arrive. It is an important factor to take into consideration when living out here. Many rural communities across the United States are seeing a shortage of hospitals, medical staff, ambulances, and fire trucks, slowing down response times for emergency care.

This isn’t too dissimilar to the way our government responds to disasters.

Recent federal cost-cutting has made our government even slower to respond than it already was, as we saw in the recent Texas floods when red-tape bureaucracy and understaffed FEMA officials lost crucial time in getting aid to Texans. In an era of rapidly intensifying storms, fires, and floods, that kind of lag is a matter of life and death.

Examples like this and Hurricane Katrina, western wildfires and Covid are all representative of how we can no longer count solely on the government systems to rescue us.

Our flailing government is burdened with political polarization, corrupt prioritization, systematic limitations, and budget constraints. The Great Society Era is over. We can no longer depend on our government for assistance.

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Community Working Together to Resolve Problems

Disasters and emergencies aside, in my remote community, we cannot call the police for every loose dog, gunshot fire, vandal or code violation. We don’t want to. We live in our remote off grid community to allow for a little wiggle room when it comes to freedoms, and we give that to our neighbors too. Because of this, we need to handle these situations best we can with dignity, giving people the benefit of doubt and acting with kindness when possible. But what happens when that doesn’t work?

Recently my neighborhood reignited a long-lost neighborhood association, re-establishing its standing and nonprofit status. The reason for this resurgence was a sudden need to protect our neighborhood from a land grab by a profiteer. (This is a long story for another time.) Because of my interest in community and the potential I see for doing a lot of good in our off-grid neighborhood, and because they couldn’t find anyone else, I became a member of the Tres Orejas Neighborhood Association. While many people objected for fear that we would start imposing rules such as noise control or light control (which many people did want!), most people were happy to have a valid organization that could work together to make positive changes. We did not wish to impose rules, but we do hope to help neighbors that need assistance.

We are brand new and have only recently voted to pass our by-laws, but we have a vision of helping each other through skill share resources, security efforts, growing food, creating community green spaces, applying for grants for services, and having a voice in government when things like zoning or land auctions affect us.

There is no doubt that we are stronger in numbers. As an organized group, we can get so much more done. When we come together with one voice. When we share our resources. When we have each other’s backs.

I’m not going lie, we’re a ragtag group each with our own ideas, agendas and quirks. I tend to be diplomatic until you push me the wrong way. I’m not necessarily suited for office but I’m happy to help and I show up. Showing up is the most important thing and it is surprising how many people are willing to do it and how many more people aren’t.

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How to Create Community

There are many ways to create community. I have other in-person communities such as my book club, yoga studio and women’s group. We come together at regular intervals with shared goals and interests. We support each other and create safe spaces to share, listen and be heard.

Consider where you already have community. Maybe at work, place of worship, clubs, sport teams or at the salon. Honor the communities that already exist in your life. If you tend to complain about these groups, see if you can bring in some gratitude instead for what they give you, such as emotional support, accountability or friendship.

Get curious about whether you could extend the purpose of any of your communities. Could you volunteer together for a charity, trade childcare, create an emergency call list or food trains for times of need? In this way, it goes from social interaction to support system.

Consider if there are already communities around you that you could be a part of such as a neighborhood association, environmental organization, food bank, local government, rotary club, parent teacher association, and the like. Go to a meeting and check out the vibe. See if this is something you could see yourself devoting your time to and if it would be a positive way to support and be supported locally.

If you have the time and the will, create your own community. First determine what your purpose is. You can write a mission statement. The mission statement for T.O.N.A. is in part, “The Tres Orejas Neighborhood Association shall endeavor to preserve the off-grid nature of Tres Orejas…shall work collectively towards shared goals that sustainably nurture, enhance, and empower our community for generations to come.” We name who we are and what we do. Perhaps yours is a group of local people who meet to discuss ways to improve your community or to share resources or to help elders or clean up your parks. Maybe you want to start a book club so you can feel inspired to read and discuss big ideas. Maybe your book club revolves around political justice, feminism, spirituality or nature.

You can start small and invite people you already know. Look for people with different skill sets that contribute in different ways. Decide if you want to keep it small and exclusive or if your goal is to grow. If you want to grow, determine the best mode of outreach like flyers, social media or word-of-mouth.

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Do it Anyway

If you feel like you want to join a community, but you don’t have the time, consider how much time you spend online on social media and see if you can convert that to in-person hours. Even if you find a community that only meets once a month, it will still be a group of people that you can collaborate with and provide mutual support.

We can’t do it alone. And we can’t count on the government to provide all our needs. Community is a necessary part of thriving and surviving as humans in the 21^st century. Turn off your phone and visit a neighbor.

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It’s Earth Day, but I want to write about the Moon. I want to write about how it breaks my heart that we are in a space race with China to colonize the Moon. I want to write about how as long as Earth Day exists, (a once-a-year only event to stop and consider, hey, maybe we should care about our planet,) we have no business developing and exploiting outer space. I hope you understand.

Artemis II astronauts just completed a slingshot around the Moon and while we celebrate their successful return, I mourn what this means for us. Because although they experienced the overview effect, the state of awe that arises from seeing Earth from space where you suddenly recognize that we all belong to a small, fragile, interconnected home planet, I don’t need to go to space to feel this transcendence every day. Humanity abuses, pollutes and pillages Earth, and now we seek to do the same to the Moon.

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The Moon is Magic

Did you know the Moon’s cratered surface is a record of billions of years of impacts from space rocks, a witness to our solar system’s impact history that Earth has largely erased? The Moon is a record keeper.

Did you know that in the distant past, the Moon and Earth sometimes formed a shared shield against the young Sun’s harsh solar wind, helping our planet maintain its atmosphere? The Moon was our early protector.

Did you know in many earth-based cultures, the Moon, Grandmother Moon, Sister Moon, is honored as the feminine eye watching over us, lovingly helping to guide our way?

When the Moon is full, she brightens our nights, so we have no need of light. The Moon is not lit from within but a reflection of our Star. She reflects light back to us in the dark. She reflects our own cyclical nature. She reflects our psyche. She reminds us that the living world is not all light, it is darkness too and when she pauses from reflecting, we are left to reflect on our own. She disappears from night. She is with us during the day when we are unaware of her presence, she is still there, ever revolving.

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Humans are Connected to the Moon

Did you know that some evolutionary theories suggest that women’s menses are linked to the lunar cycle because our ancient ancestors mated in the moonlight and bled in the dark when they could hide from predators? The word moon shares an ancient root with the words menses and month.

Across the world and throughout history, countless cultures have used lunar or lunisolar calendars systems that count months by the Moon’s phases, tying festivals and ceremonies to her changing light.

The Moon pulls on the oceans with her gravitational leverage, so the tides rise to meet her cycles like water bellies bulging from the Earth. Did you know she subtly pulses the groundwater and aquifers too, so that many traditions attune to her rhythms when planting and tending food? Did you know our own bodies are 60% water and so we must be drawn closer to her too, energetically, in ways we may not know?

The moon is witness and protector, cycles and growth, tides and gravity, culture and ancient roots, reflection and introspection, darkness and light, mystery and intuition, she is the liminal beloved of our lives and we barely notice. Well, some of us do.

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Moon Worship

I honor the moon most prominently twice a month. I honor her yin and her yang, her fullness and her depth. On the new moon, I find my quietest center, the center of my center, and I pray for medicine to carry with me until the next cycle begins. On the full moon, I celebrate in circle with drums, song, friends, meditation and manifestation. I promise her I will act on my prayer for she has returned to light and so we all must eventually.

Colonizing the Moon Changes Everything

But now, Man wants to build space stations for people to live on her surface. There is talk of space industry and the optimistic say it will relieve the Earth’s congestion. (Send AI data centers to space!) But many of us know better. We have not learned our lesson, and we will only repeat our crimes. We will not reduce pollution on Earth; we will add our pollution to the Moon.

Once upon a time, the Earth was a wild place, but Man colonized her and now she is coughing, sputtering, relinquishing. We are killing our own habitat like the most ignorant animals in the galaxy.

Perhaps some will gaze in wonder at the modern Moon with humans living upon it, but I know I will never see the Moon the same again—naked, unpolluted, raw wilderness. Some may say, she’s only a rock! But they don’t know what I know, what so many of us know, that she’s so much more. The moon is pure, strong, mystical, mythical, shapeshifting beauty.

I will always love her, always honor her, but I will never see her the same way again.

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Moon Rituals to Practice Twice a Month

Below are rituals for the Moon and how I practice honoring her cycles. Working with the rhythm of the moon will change the way you function in the world for the better. They allow you to honor your own internal cycle and phases in tune with the natural world.

I lead both full moon and new moon ceremonies in my community in different capacities and have done so religiously for the past five years. It has become a beautiful essential part of my eco-spiritual practice and if this calls to you, here is a starter kit to practice your own moon worship.

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Whimsy is trending and I’m all for it. This makes perfect sense. We’re in the middle of a slow collapse during late-stage capitalism, things can feel heavy. Last week, I wrote about going on a news diet because we are inundated with negativity. Everyone is feeling inflation, the economic downturn and the stifled job market. AI is taking jobs while increasing global warming with its huge data centers. We are at war for reasons no one fully understands.

This is why we need whimsy.

When I think of whimsy, I think of doing something for the sake of joy, beauty and fun without commodification, purpose or productivity. Very anti-capitalist. AI sucks at being whimsical. Whimsy is light, regenerative and refreshing when we need it most.

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Forest Bathing

As a Nature Therapy Guide, my job is to take people into green spaces and give them invitations full of whimsy that allow them to connect more mindfully with the more-than-human world. This is called forest bathing from the Japanese translation shinrin yoku. There is not actually bathing involved, though I guess there could be if the invitation calls for it. Forest bathing and mindfully spending time in the natural world calms the nervous system, relaxes, heals and restores us. Whimsy has a similar effect of uplifting our spirits with simple gestures of joy.

Whimsy in Nature

So here is a list of whimsical things to do in green spaces. Please add your own whimsical ideas in the comments below so we can keep a good list going. Remember to practice common sense, land ethics and safety when in wild places.

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1. In the rain or snow, tilt back your head, open your mouth and stick out your tongue.

2. Scan the ground for treasures like a cool shell, fallen leaf or twig to take home and place in a special spot to admire.

3. Look for animal tracks and if you find them, follow to see where they go.

4. Inhale deeply and name all that you smell.

5. Splash in puddles or mud. Get dirty.

6. Explore your environment with touch. Touch everything you are curious about and notice what textures you like.

7. Pick a color and look for everything in that color you can find.

8. Greet every insect you see from bee to spider with a cheerful hello.

9. Hug a tree, notice how your nervous system shifts.

10. Sing to a flower, share your current favorite song. Notice how the flower reacts.

11. Gather items that interest you from trash to pinecones to lichen and create an altar to the earth beside the trail for others to find.

12. Wander off trail, let your heart sense guide you. I wonder what you’ll find.

13. Find a seed like acorn, pinecone, or dried flower or grass and plant it in a special place with a good intention for the land.

14. Find a body of water and let your fingers skim the surface. Maybe take off your shoes and dip your feet.

15. Build a sandcastle.

16. Build a snowman.

17. Draw pictures or words in the dirt with a stick.

18. Bring your camera and take up-close photos of things that catch your eye.

19. Close your eyes and listen. See how many sounds you can identify near and far.

20. Skip.

21. Eavesdrop on bird songs. See if you can determine if they’re talking about you.

22. Lie on the ground and watch the clouds. Practice nephelomancy.

23. Count butterflies.

24. Climb a tree or boulder.

25. Build a shelter for a human or fairy.

26. Nap on a bough or a patch of grass under a tree.

27. Pick berries and eat them off the bush.

28. Share water from your canteen with a thirsty plant.

29. Find a mossy boulder shaped like a chair and sit with it.

30. Stand facing the wind and let it blow you about. Dance like a tree.

Add your whimsical nature ideas…

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Though we live off the grid, we aren’t living in a bubble. We are still watching television and scrolling on social media like most people. Even though we live in the middle of nowhere in a beautiful, serene desert environment, we are still tethered to the onslaught of daily headlines that never cease. While it is important to me to stay in touch with what is happening in the world, constant updates wreck my nervous system and negatively infiltrate my quality of life.

On my decade-long journey of going off the news partially, then completely, and then slowly reintegrating it into my life, I have learned a lot about how to create a healthy news diet. I discovered what is necessary and what is peripheral and found a balance that works for me. In line with our mission to help people find a slower pace in life, I’m going to share what I learned and help you to create your own news diet, based on your personal needs.

First, let me see if I can convince you that you need a news diet.

The Rise of the 24-Hour News Cycle

Prior to 1980, television news was consumed in 15 to 60-minute blocks once or twice a day. In 1980, CNN launched what would come to be known as the 24-hour news cycle. A little more than a decade later, CNN gained notoriety for its coverage of the first Gulf War. People at home could stay tuned moment to moment on updates of the war on the ground. I remember this time because my brother-in-law was stationed overseas in the Persian Gulf with the US Navy. I was young, but I felt a direct connection to the soldiers that were fighting. We tied a yellow ribbon around our tree in solidarity.

My mom didn’t yet have cable television, so we didn’t watch it constantly. But this period in the 1990s created competitors in the 24-hour news cycle game, including Fox News, MSNBC, and CNBC. By the time the O.J. Simpson murder trial aired in 1995, we did have cable television, and the continuous all-day coverage was mesmerizing. The 24-hour news cycle was solidified and became a normal part of life when the internet exacerbated the constant, round-the-clock news updates.

Feeds on Negativity

Humans have a negativity bias. We pay more attention to, are more influenced by and more likely to remember negative events over positive ones. This is most likely because we protectively evolved to pay more attention to threats so we could adapt and survive. Our brains are still wired this way, even though we are no longer running from sabretooth tigers.

One study showed that adding more negative words to a headline increased the click‑through rates, even when the story was similar. Negative stories feel more urgent and credible, so people are more likely to click, believe, and discuss them. Since emotionally charged, anger‑ or fear‑inducing posts reliably generate higher engagement, they are optimized by news outlets and social media algorithms to get more likes and clicks. So, staying glued to news and social media feeds is basically flooding our nervous system with negativity.

Additionally, this results in rabbit holes in which we are inundated with a singular opinion. Only learning about one perspective of any event does not increase your knowledge, it is only confirming what you already believe. Responsible news engagement requires us to look at different angles, engage our critical thinking and come to conclusions on our own, not based on what a computer program suggests will make us angrier.

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Our Nervous System and the News

The human nervous system was not built to be in constant hyper-vigilance of worldwide atrocities. When we see upsetting stories, our brain can interpret them as threats, triggering the sympathetic system, causing adrenaline and cortisol to rise, heart rate and breathing to speed up, and muscles to tense. This can happen even though the threatening story is on a screen. Our amygdala responds to emotionally intense images and stories, not just physical danger. Repeated activation via doomscrolling and 24/7 news can leave the nervous system in a state of chronic hyper‑arousal, which is linked to anxiety, irritability, sleep disruption, headaches, and blood pressure changes. Overtime, people may exhibit trauma response patterns. This has been found to be true even when the news is playing in the background and you’re not actually paying attention to it.

If you are already a sensitive person such as me, the symptoms are likely to be worse. You are of no good to the world if your mental health is disrupted. I learned this the hard way after finding myself constantly on edge and quick to anger. I was doing myself and everyone around me a disservice by continuing to consume the news at the rate I was going.

My Journey with Reducing News Consumption

In 2016 after Donald Trump was elected president, I stopped listening, reading and watching the news. I would love to say that it was in protest, but it was mostly due to overwhelm. Well, first it was shock. I suddenly realized that my nation was not what I thought it was. I couldn’t handle all the reports explaining why Hilary Clinton lost, analyzing where the Democrats went wrong and all the justifications for this disappointing outcome. After a while I realized that I preferred to not engage with the news. I felt genuinely better not being inundated with the constant world report.

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You Don’t Actually Need the News

The thing that most people don’t realize is that you don’t actually need to attend to the news to learn the news. First, people around you are constantly talking about the news. Open your ears to it and you will begin to notice. Especially if you have politically minded friends and family. Eric is the most updated person I know. Because of his years as a journalist and his work in communications, he always has one train of thought focused on what is happening in the world. Due to this, the news was unavoidable. If something major or interesting happened, I knew about it. If I was interested enough, I would do my own research and learn more.

Second, if you are on social media, you are always watching the news. Even though I didn’t intentionally watch, read or listen to the news, I was still aware of what was happening via my social media feed. I tended to follow people who posted political content. I soon learned that this was problematic when my news became one-sided algorithm fed. I learned this with an unnerving intensity after October 7^th, 2023 when all the political content I followed ended up posting drastically misinformed, often antisemitic information all over my feed. At that time, I left social media too for the same reason I left all other news sources, my nervous system couldn’t hack it. Looking at my social media feed only enraged me the way news media did when Trump first got elected. My news sources dwindled greatly.

For the next couple of years, all my news came from word of mouth. Sometimes I felt completely out of it. People brought up current events and I stared dumbfounded. Embarrassed I might change the subject or otherwise ask them to fill me in. I intermittently looked up news stories I heard about to learn what was happening, but otherwise I was naïve. Overall, though challenging, I don’t think this was harmful in any way. I did what I needed to do at the time to get by.

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You Don’t Have to Bear Witness

This may be controversial (maybe this entire post is controversial) but you don’t have to bear witness to other people’s pain to be a good person. Soon after I left social media, I was in a group for women entrepreneurs and explained why I had to leave Instagram and Facebook even though my business might suffer since I used them for marketing. A woman I barely knew said to me, “You are irresponsible to close your eyes to what is happening. It is our responsibility to bear witness to the pain and suffering of others.” She claimed that she had authority on the subject because she was gay and her wife was Black. I didn’t know what this had to do with my experience, but I let it go and spoke to the moderator later who agreed with my confusion.

I was deeply offended. Going off social media because people I once respected and followed for their fight against discrimination started using antisemitic cliches is not irresponsible. It is very responsible to myself. Ancestral trauma and epigenetics were causing my entire system to fire on high, and I could find no peace online. It was hard enough seeing it on every corner and from people I knew but there was no reason to voluntarily bear witness online.

The idea of bearing witness comes from Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor, author, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient who said that “his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living,” and that he has “no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory.” When people apply Wiesel’s framing to everyday news and media feeds, they are saying, do not look away so that the suffering of others disappears. Perhaps this woman in the meeting did not realize that my cultural, experiential and familial connection to Israel made it impossible for me to look away. I didn’t need Instagram to remind me.

What I am saying is that staying informed of what is happening in the world is a means of recognizing other people’s vulnerability and struggles and inspiring ways in which you may be able to respond, not with virtue signaling, but with donating, voting or speaking up to your government representatives. Staying informed does not mean to consume horror endlessly. Because on the flip side, constant exposure can exceed our capacity to make meaning and overwhelm us out of doing anything because nothing seems like it will make a difference. Constant witnessing can lead to news fatigue and emotional burnout. Responsible witnessing means limiting your intake and seeking sources that inform without crushing.

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Since the hostage return and ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, I have begun to reintroduce the news back into my life. While antisemitism is still growing globally, my news fast allowed me to be better resourced now to witness it. I am able to witness and empathize with others’ pain in the Ukraine, Middle East, Sudan and in my own country where people are struggling economically and immigrants are living in fear. I have reintroduced the news back into my life by creating a news diet that works for me.

Quick note: For the sake of honesty, I want to point out that even with my news diet in place, I still find that reading the news is often frustrating, disempowering and depressing. Trump’s reign cannot arrive quickly enough for me, and I just hope he doesn’t completely demolish our democracy on his way out.

How to Create Your Personal News Diet

As with a food diet, dieting is kind of hard. You are restricting things from your life that have become habitual and breaking habits are never easy. If you are like Eric and feel that you are fully capable of compartmentalizing the news without it affecting your everyday wellbeing, then you’re probably doing a good job of creating information balance in your life. However, if you are like me and notice that the news’s negativity can be overwhelming and trickle into other areas of your life, then it may be worthwhile for you to commit to trying a news diet and see how you feel. If you are interested in learning more, read on.

My hope is that the following 8 tips for how to create a simple and doable news diet gives you permission to step away from the battering new cycle and trending horrors and listen to your body, prioritize your values, and bring more peace and positivity into your life. This list is distilled from years of experience, experiments, and careful research and is shared exclusively with our paid subscribers. Thank you for supporting this work and making it possible to dig deeper together.

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We're Eric and Johanna, and we've been living off grid in a strawbale house on the Mesa outside Taos, New Mexico for over six years with our daughter. We started this Substack in 2021, a year into the pandemic and a year after we moved from our home in town to our off-grid tiny home on a high desert Mesa about 30 miles from town. If you want our origin story, start here:

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What We Write About

We publish something new every week (at least), from articles to videos to podcasts. The majority of our content is free, but about a quarter of what we share is for paid subscribers only. Our Uncertain Future centers around an alternative lifestyle that is at its core about:

• sustainability/conservation/regeneration

• minimalism/anti-materialism/anti-capitalist values

• slow living/rest

• decentralization/localism

• nature connections/animism/seasonal rituals

We are not preppers, Chrisitan survivalists, drug addicts, criminals or misanthropes. Eric and Johanna grew up in the suburbs, with different cultural backgrounds and have multiple higher degrees. What we are is passionate about living a life that is healthy, compassionate and rich in all those important things like loving relationships, being close to nature, taking time to relax and following our bliss. Johanna is a Nature Therapy Guide, writer, artist, Reiki practitioner, and yoga instructor. Eric is a DIY enthusiast, runner, mountain biker, environmental writer with a passion for decentralization and he works in communications for a blockchain company. With differing left and right brain strengths, together we try to cover the whole picture.

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Why are you here?

We’re curious what brought you here. Wherever you are in your journey, whether you are already off grid or ready to go off grid right now and looking for practical information on how to do it, getting curious about the lifestyle and looking for inspiration to take the leap, or more of an armchair voyeur who is happy that other people are doing it but prefers their creature comforts, you are welcome here.

Where to Start:

If you’re looking for inspiration to take the leap, you may like:

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If you are interested in discovering ways to integrate the off-grid lifestyle into your life without fully going off the grid, you may like:

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If you are off grid or ready to go off grid right now, you may like:

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And if you are a nature lover interested in integrating more ways to connect with the other-than-human world into your life, you may like:

Listen to Us

We have a podcast too. Here’s where to start.

OUFPOD: Reflecting on 6 Years Off-Grid Amid Collapse
What collapse feels like day to day, how our definition of it has changed, and practical takeaways if you’re collapse-curious but still on the grid.

We’re on NPR’s The Modern West
The post about our appearance on the Cheap Dirt series, with links to listen.

How This Works

Free subscribers get most of our posts — essays, podcast episodes, seasonal rituals, and the occasional how-to.

Paid subscribers ($5/month) get everything, including our deeper how-to guides, Earth Sensory Perception essays, the full podcast archive, and Johanna’s nature-based practices. It’s what keeps this going without ads or sponsors.

If you’re new and just trying us out, we’re running a free first month for paid subscriptions.

Subscribe for free | Start your free month of paid

Well, we hope that gives you plenty to peruse and consider. We understand that we live in a world with so much media, and we appreciate that you consider our work worthwhile enough to invest your time and energy in. Our future is uncertain and every moment counts. Make the most of it!

All our best,

Johanna and Eric

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Jez is a true pioneer and the perfect person to start this series on Neighbors of the Mesa. Learn about her life as a child of one of the oldest colonial families in America, her surprising mid-life awakening, leaving everything behind to become a travelling archeologist (or as she calls it, a dirt bum) and after getting her PhD in Alaska at 70, moving out to the Mesa community alone and building her house. As an artist and intellectual with multiple degrees, Jez, has never followed the path well-trodden. Her love of living on the land, working with her hands and adventure, has kept her young and vibrant despite health and family setbacks.

Jez’s life is truly an inspiration, and she had a lot of stories to share, many of which I had to cut out for the sake of time and continuity. I was surprised at how much she remembered—names, dates, and ages—even when she fumbled with them a bit. Her beautiful home is a testament to a life well lived—filled with artifacts, art, plants, animals and memories.

If you want inspiration to go off grid or wonder how one ages well off the grid, start with Jez.

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I had been wanting to start this series for a long while now, interviewing the very cool people that live in my off-grid community. It turned out that it’s more work than I expected with interviewing and video editing. If you like this and want to see more of it, please show support and let me know by becoming a paid subscriber. I did not paywall this one and want to continue to offer them for free, your financial support will help me to do so.

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The result is an episode called “The Apocalyptic American Dream” and it’s part of the podcast’s Cheap Dirt series, a season exploring what happens when people across the American West decide to opt out of the conventional housing market.

We are the final episode in the series. It dropped last week and you can listen here:

• 🎧 Listen on NPR

• 🎧 Listen on themodernwest.org

• 🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts

We talked about a lot of things, such as how we ended up here, what collapse actually feels like when you’re living through it slowly, why having survival skills makes the chaos of the world feel a little less overwhelming, and the strange, tangled history of how this stretch of mesa outside Taos became a kind of no man’s land in the first place.

If you’ve been reading Our Uncertain Future for a while, some of this will sound familiar, but from a different angle. The conversation is candid, surprising, and a little silly.

There were things we didn’t get to. Melodie had limited time and we could have gone on for hours. We didn’t get deep into the day-to-day practical stuff or talk much about what it’s like raising a kid out here, or the ways technology both saves us and makes things harder.

Some of that we covered in our latest podcast episode, “Reflecting on 6 Years Off-Grid Amid Collapse”, which came out earlier this week. And in fact, Melodie plans to drop that episode into The Modern West feed in the coming days. So if you’re subscribed there, you’ll hear from us again soon.

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If You’re New Here

If you found us through The Modern West, welcome. Here’s the short version:

We’re Eric and Johanna. We’ve been living off-grid on the Mesa outside Taos for over six years now, with our daughter, a lot of mud, some solar panels, and the realization that the way most of us have been taught to live doesn't work.

Our Uncertain Future is where we write about what we’re learning. Some of it is practical like how to garden in the desert, how to live on less, what off-grid actually costs. Some of it is more reflective like seasonal rituals, slow living, and what collapse really means.

We publish something every week. Paid members get access to deeper how-to guides, our full archive, and nature-based essays from Johanna’s work as a certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide.

Subscribe for free and you’ll get everything except the paywalled stuff. If what you find here is valuable, consider going paid ($5/month) to support our mission to inspire others to explore alternative lifestyles better for the Earth and each other.

We’re still a little amazed that NPR came up our dirt road. But it also makes a certain kind of sense. The questions Melodie is asking in the Cheap Dirt series about affordable housing, about the American Dream, about what people do when the system stops working for them, are our questions too. We represent one answer.

Thanks for being here. And if you listen to the episode, we’d love to hear what you think.

— Eric & Johanna

P.S. — If you’ve been thinking about going paid, now’s a good time. We’re running a free first month for new paid subscribers through the end of March. Hit the button below to try it out.

Start your free month →

As she got older, we looked for things on our own without the list, becoming more creative with what constitutes signs of spring—pill bugs under rocks, birds in pairs, animal tracks in the mud, skeletonized leaves, bones, hollow logs, lichen, the smell of compost, the river rushing with snowmelt.

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This game was a way to connect us with the changing season, to instill a deeper connection with the natural world and how it affects us mentally, physically and spiritually, to learn how to be naturalists in our ecosystem, to get outside, to spend time together, and to have fun.

Now that she’s a teenager with a busy life of school, jobs, internships, and clubs, and would rather spend time with her friends, our spring treasure hunt is less likely to happen, at least in a traditional way—now we hunt for prom dresses, senior photoshoot locales and colleges.

My own connection with the natural world has deepened immensely as I’ve aged and sought my own healing and relationship with the living landscapes. As a nature therapy guide and a nature intuitive, my connection is instantaneous. As soon as I step foot into the forest, I am at once in communion with the ecosystem. I am in communication with the trees, the river, the butterflies and everything around me as if I were a note in a larger symphony and I only had to enter the cacophony to become part of the music. This is something I teach others to do in my courses and my writing. This way of interbeing with the other-than-human world has brought me endless joy, calm, belonging, and magic.

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I still go on spring treasure hunts. This year, I noticed a robin carrying a stick in its mouth, a plethora of brown butterflies flitting in pairs, new willow buds, green grass poking through the dirt, the warmth of sunshine on my arms, a flowing spring, mud, a spider, two rabbits, a woodpecker pecking on a tree and a feeling of joy and promise.

Being in green spaces at this time of year, we immediately sense the feeling of renewal, awakening, fertility, and balance innate in this season. Allowing yourself to set aside a sacred time to simply absorb all the offerings of the natural world and join the symphony will bring you into concert with the blossoming and beauty of spring within yourself.

I invite you to celebrate the Vernal Equinox with your own Spring Treasure Hunt. I wonder what you will discover.

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Here is a spring playlist to get you in the mood:

Here is a guided meditation:

Experience yourself as a seed in the earth, gently pushing through the topsoil and blossoming into full bloom. This practice is great for grounding into the earth's elements and feelings of abundance and joy.

Full Bloom Flowering Yoga Nidra on Insight Timer by Johanna DeBiase

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