“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

You may also like:

• What living off-grid really looks like compared to the prepper fantasy

• How our definition of “collapse” has changed over six years

• Where tech genuinely helps, and where it quietly makes things worse

• Practical takeaways if you’re collapse‑curious but still grid‑tied

  . We also dive deeper into this post in the process. If you’re new here, this essay is the best on-ramp to our collapse framework:

We’d also love to hear from you. What’s your working definition of ‘collapse’ right now, and how does it show up where you live? Let us know in the comments.

Time is Not Linear

Standing at the edge of the ocean, I am soothed by the infinite repetition of waves roaring and colliding against the sand. In an hour, the foam fingers of the swells will be high enough to reach the legs of my beach chair. In a few hours more, they will recede again, leaving a line of shells and seaweed along the shore. This cycle will begin again in a few hours, thanks to the gravitational pull of the moon.

The tide reminds me that time is not linear. Our society operates on linear time. We perceive time as having a beginning and an end. We are born at point A and we exist until we die at point B. The years tick by in chronological order, one after the other on a straight path into the future. Our own years accumulate in the same way, each year adding another number to our age, always proceeding forward to our final destination.

When we perceive time as linear, we expect progress to be constant and so pressure is applied on us to advance. Starting over is considered moving backwards in linear time. To start over is to “lose time.” Even rest, relaxation or resignation can be thought of as “lost time” because they are the antithesis of linear time, which requires a constant forward motion. Waiting for something to happen is considered “wasting time” because we consider time without action to be a waste.

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Nature Lives in Cyclical Time

In nature, time is cyclical. A multitude of cycles layered together, causing spirals of time. There is the cycle of a day from sunset to sunset, of a month from new moon to new moon, of seasons from springtime to springtime and of lifetimes from birth to death to rebirth.

Each season of the solar cycle, trees lose their leaves, grow new ones, until those brown, and release again. Each lunar cycle affects the direction the sap flows in the tree and the amount of growth it receives in a week. When a tree falls, it becomes a nurse log that creates the perfect environment for new life to grow. When one cycle ends, another begins

Consider how our body’s cells are constantly replicating and replacing themselves. Some parts of the body are renewed more frequently than others, but over time all the cells in our body are different than the ones we were born with. This cycle occurs within a multitude of cycles like the solar years and life cycle of our body. Age is not linear, but cyclical or more specifically a spiral.

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Time is a Wheel

In many Indian traditions, time is understood as cyclical, through kālachakra, the “wheel of time,” in which creation and dissolution continually turn and return. As a wheel, there is no single beginning or final end, only ongoing turning. The various cycles, such as cosmic, earthly and inner seasons, overlay with one another, the pattern repeats, but the details and conditions shift, so the wheel of time holds both recurrence and change, just as natural cycles spiral back around but never in the same way. “In essence, the Kalachakra view maps the macrocosm and microcosm onto one another…The movements of stars and the movements of our breath mirror each other in a profound correspondence. Thus, the cosmos and the individual are nondual and mutually pervasive, intimately interconnected and influencing each other,” writes Luis Gallardo in his essay, Turning the Wheel of Time. Just as the cycles of the moons affect the cycles of the ocean. Just as the circadian rhythms of the sun affect the cycles of sleep in our bodies. Everything is interconnected, turning simultaneously inward and outward, in cyclical time.

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Healing Happens in Cycles

Consider the healing process. When we function in linear time then anytime we have a setback in our healing process, we feel defeated because we should be progressively getting better, otherwise we are failing to heal. Also, we feel like at this moment we should be in optimal health instead of understanding the cyclical nature of our body, which is not an upward climb to constant improvement, but an ever-evolving state of being.

“If time is a line, as western thinking presumes, we might think this is a unique moment for which we have to devise a solution that enables that line to continue. If time is a circle, as the Indigenous worldview presumes, the knowledge we need is already within the circle; we just have to remember it to find it again and let it teach us,” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her essay, Ancient Green. In cyclical time, when our healing is delayed, we are given another opportunity to get better, to reevaluate what worked and what didn’t work with more wisdom, instead of feeling shame or disappointment. Our expectations are more realistic. We understand that our standards for health must shift with the shifts in our body and environment, such as hormones, sunlight hours and climate. This example can be applied to creativity, work, relationships, and many aspects of your life.

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In cyclical time, we are able to repeat old patterns graciously, understanding that though the pattern may repeat, we are never the same twice. Though I may have made the same mistake twice, I did it differently this time. I did not fail to learn, I am still learning.

Cycles Embrace Uncertainty

Water molecules of the ocean evaporate into vapor and rise to the sky where they accumulate into clouds and rain down to return to the ocean. Each moment on this cyclical path the water transforms, and while the pattern is well-trodden, repeated in multitudes, each time the cycle is performed, the ways in which the pattern plays out changes. The cloud is unique and the ocean has shifted. As the saying goes, you never stand in the same river twice. The beauty of cyclical time is that not only are we moving in spirals, but the spiral is also always changing. The results are always uncertain and mysterious.

This is counter to chronological linear time in which there is no room for mystery, the movement is always forward and the results are always progress. Linear time is unnatural and a social construct. If we consider time as cyclical instead, then each moment is an opportunity to start again and with a fresh new perspective.

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Time is on Your Side

By applying cyclical time, we can release what no longer serves us when we have evolved out of it without feeling like we are inconsistent, flaky, or unreliable. Cyclical time allows us to start fresh whenever “the time” feels right to do so. You can never “lose time.” Cycles are happening every moment, every day, every year. Allow yourself to be guided by the natural energy cycles within you of movement and rest, solitude and socialization, creative outbursts and fallow times. By recognizing and acknowledging these cycles, we can flow more easily, slowly, and naturally, like the ebb and rise of the tide, the trough and crest of the wave, the turning face of the moon

Are You Ready to Discover Your Cyclical Rhythm?

If this topic resonates with you and you want to learn more about how to embrace cyclical time in your daily, monthly, seasonal, yearly, and lifetime spirals, I’ve included a list of 9 ways to practice cyclical time. These practices can help you slow down and find more ease with your own natural rhythms. This list is a compendium of life experience, nature‑based trainings, and research, and is available to paid subscribers only.

How to Discover and Practice Cyclical Time:

Here are nine simple ways to discover and practice your own cyclical time so you can slow down, listen to your body, and reconnect with the natural rhythms supporting your life. Start by choosing one or two practices that feel most alive for you right now. Let them move in cycles too, releasing any practice that no longer fits and beginning a new one when the season of your life changes.

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The headlines are filled with biases, but what if every journalist, pundit or influencer was forced to put down real money to back up all of their predictions or prognostications? Such a filter actually exists.

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I’ve written a bit about our belief in the importance of decentralized systems and I’ve become fascinated in recent months by prediction markets. They’re often derided as a form of unfettered gambling (there’s obviously some truth there), but that’s not the whole story. As these markets have become more popular and widespread, they’ve also become a powerful source of intelligence that is uniquely decentralized and transparent.

So I’m combining my background in journalism with this powerful new tool (and some assistance from a bunch of code and AI to parse through tens of thousands of markets) to launch Low Pass, a weekly newsletter that sums up what people - as a whole - truly think will happen next in the world.

Check it out - it’s a fun weekly forecast that might also just be the most insightful. I’m also giving Our Uncertain Future subscribers a free 30 day paid subscription to get the full content. Just use this link to grab your free month.

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When I was twelve years old, every night at 11:11 pm I would make a wish for a boyfriend and world peace. The boyfriend would take a few more years. I’m still waiting on world peace.

I don’t know how I thought world peace would arrive. Maybe I thought, like you, that one day all the world leaders would come to an agreement to end all wars, oppression and violence, despite several millennia of historical evidence to the contrary.

World peace is not going to ride in on a horse one day waving a white flag and leaving a wake of peace trailing behind it. Nor can we rely on the rich and powerful to turn over a new leaf, denounce material wealth and oppressive control. They are not going to suddenly step down and form a non-hierarchical society, hold hands in a circle and sing kumbaya.

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World Peace Comes from Within

You know you want world peace, but have you considered how it’s going to happen? Are you waiting for someone else to figure it out? Maybe you never really thought about it before.

Here’s the hard truth: world peace begins with you. World peace is only going to occur when the majority of people in the world are peaceful. People are going to be peaceful by finding their inner peace. Since we can’t immediately change the chaos of our modern world, peace must come from within outward, not the other way around.

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Inner Peace is Contagious

The good news is that inner peace has the beautiful effect of spreading rapidly and exponentially. Think about someone in your life who is peaceful. No matter what chaos occurs on the outside, this person holds steady. They approach every situation with calm and fortitude. They don’t complain or commiserate. They don’t fixate on the most horrible current event in the news. They are collected. But they are not cold. They emanate warmth and caring. They laugh easily. They are honest.

Consider how you enjoy being around this person. Recall how when you are near to them, you also feel at peace. They relax and ground you. That’s because inner peace spreads. It’s contagious. When you are surrounded by peaceful people not only do you feel peaceful, but you want to be peaceful like them as well. They model another way of being.

Additionally, you get into an energetic coherence with people around you. Your nervous system, emotions, and heart rhythms can synchronize with others. Studies show that when people interact, their physiology can synchronize heart rate, heart rate variability, facial expressions, and even brain activity can subtly lock into similar rhythms. So, just being around peaceful people can bring peace to others.

For more examples of inner peace, consider a mountain, tree or ocean. The mountain remains solid and still, even as the storm circles overhead. The tree sways with the strong winds but remains rooted to the ground. The ocean waves break overhead but in the depth of the sea there is eternal peace and quiet.

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Inner Peace Takes Work

Inner peace requires work. It’s not easy in a world full of challenges, struggles, and chaos. But you have overcome obstacles before. Remember a time that you overcome an obstacle-- illness, loss, transition, heartbreak, etc. How did you do it? You may have asked for help or been blessed with external support but ultimately your resilience and ability to overcome came from within you. You had to find it within yourself to make peace with the situation. Otherwise, you never move on, you never overcome. What did it feel like to meet this challenge and overcome it? What characteristics did you need to do so? Bravery, faith, forgiveness, patience, surrender, calm? This answer might hold your recipe for inner peace.

In other words, you’ve done it before, you can do it again. And when you learn how to cultivate inner peace, each new struggle becomes easier to overcome because you have the tools, you’ve practiced for this.

This might be a hard pill to swallow, but you can welcome every struggle as an opportunity to cultivate inner peace. Every time you are faced with a new obstacle instead of feeling like a victim of circumstance and wallowing in woe, take a moment to collect yourself and find inner peace. Finding inner peace when life is going swell is one thing, but to do it when you are in the thick of tension, is a master class.

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Inner Peace Feels Great and is Worth the Work

So, finding inner peace and spreading it around to the people you come into contact with who can spread it around to others is a recipe for world peace, but it also feels great. Existing in the world in a state of equanimity means that your ego is not triggered by every little thing. The words that might have offended you before don’t bother you anymore. Even when you read the news, you can see the full picture of what is playing out and not get caught up in the drama. When you have inner peace, you are witness to the world. You are watching this great play of life unfold before you and though you are participating, you don’t have to react.

Additionally, through practice, you learn to lasso your thoughts, and you become more present in the moment. Your thoughts are no longer wandering mindlessly into regurgitating the past or jumping ahead worrying into the future. In the present, the world is a beautiful place. You can think and act spontaneously in the moment rather than based on fear, old stories, programming or past experiences. You are able to better appreciate what you have right now with a deep feeling of contentedness.

When you no longer need external validation because you discover that everything you need resides peacefully within you, you feel compassion towards yourself and others. Characteristics of greed, jealousy, dishonesty, scarcity, fear, domination and the such begin to fade away. Imagine all the people living in this peace.

If you are really committed to world peace and inner peace, then you must start by setting the intention to seek it out every chance you get. Not just to consider it sometimes when it is convenient for you but to truly devote yourself to the practice and lifestyle of cultivating inner peace. Say it out loud. Tell your friends and family. Make yourself accountable. Get a little obsessed.

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Ways to cultivate inner peace

1. Find peaceful people to be around. Search them out, ask around. Visit places they may likely be such as temples, ashrams, yoga studios, nature-based activities, etc. Spend more time with people in your life who are peaceful or cultivating peace (and maybe less time with people who are not.)

2. Meditation is the most direct but not always the easiest path to inner peace. Because meditation allows us to quiet the mind and witness our thoughts, we learn to enhance the witness mind that can objectively view the world and in time learn to not react from our ego mind. As Swami Sivananda Saraswati says, “Fewer the thoughts, greater the peace.” But meditation can look different for everyone, so don’t assume it means sitting on a pillow and chanting Om, though that is my preferred method. There is walking meditation, singing meditation, dancing meditation, guided meditation, and more. Research and find one that works for you.

3. Yoga, tai chi, qi gong and the like are all moving meditations that allow you to practice being present in the moment.

4. Practice mindfulness. Watch your thoughts and emotions throughout the day. Notice your reactions. Notice when you are unable to accept the moment just as it is, when you get angry, triggered, agitated or start to complain. Take this opportunity to relax, reset and find acceptance with what is, perhaps even appreciation for what you are being taught about yourself. Even if you do react, this is progress for noticing, so don’t be hard on yourself. Next time you will take a deep breath and surrender instead.

5. When you feel activated, practice nervous system regulation techniques such as shaking, singing, chanting, and deep breathing.

6. Time in nature calms the nervous system and allows you to deepen into a peaceful state. Relax without rushing and allow the natural world to bring you peace. Meditating in nature is all the better. Visit green spaces as much as possible. Try a sit spot practice.

7. Eat healthy, exercise, get plenty of sleep and take your vitamins. Rest often. When you are feeling good in your body, it is easier to feel good in your whole being.

8. Create what is called in yoga a sattvic environment. Sattva means a state of harmony and balance. So besides healthy foods, exercise, good attitudes and meditation, you can also create spaces that feel harmonious. This may include, uplifting or calming music, pleasing scents, uncluttered tabletops, beautiful art, plants or whatever you consider harmonious in your home.

9. Selfless service, or karma yoga, is a way to step away from yourself as the center of the universe and begin centering others. In the act of selfless service that is truly selfless and not as a way to make yourself feel good or stroke your own ego, you give your full effort without concern for the results. Acting in service of the greater good and making offerings to something greater than yourself, relaxes your ego, reduces selfishness and creates a peaceful state.

10. Be careful of what you watch. When we are watching television or the news or scrolling on social media, our mind enters a relaxed hypnogogic alpha brain state where images, sounds and ideas can enter your subconscious and affect your nervous system. I like a good thriller as much as most, but I am aware that it shifts my body out of peaceful mode and into a more excited state. Same for the news. Being aware of this, helps me to be more discerning about what is worth watching and disrupting my peace of mind.

11. Read books and listen to podcasts about finding inner peace to stay inspired, such as:

    Be Here Now – Ram Dass

    The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

    The Untethered Soul – Michael A. Singer

    Autobiography of a Yogi – Paramahansa Yogananda

    Peace is Every Step – Thich Nhat Hanh​

    True Refuge: Finding Peace & Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart - Tara Brach

    Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu

    Breath: Wake up to Life - Prem Rawat

    A Return to Love - Marianne Williamson

    The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book - don Miguel Ruiz

    Add your books and podcast suggestions that I missed in the comments:

    Leave a comment

    Our Uncertain Future is a reader-supported publication written by two people who live off the grid in the desert and hope to model a peaceful lifestyle in nature, living slow, stewarding the land, caring for community, and spreading inner peace.

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Santa Claus Versus Fairies

Before my daughter started high school, in the years before the 2020 pandemic, we used to travel a lot, about three months out of the year. Often, we spent holidays abroad. We figured out how to make Xmas and Chanukkah work in multiple lands. In some places, like Quenca, Equador, Christmas was built into the culture, a multi-day parade of people from villages across the country right outside the door of our little apartment. In other places like, Bali, Indonesia, there wasn’t so much going on. There were no Christmas lights decorating houses, no parades, and no Santa Claus with children lined up to sit on his knee. That might have been what made precocious ten-year-old Flora suspicious.

A couple days before Christmas, after I purchased local artisan toys to wrap in paper and assign to Santa, as was customary for our overseas holidays, Flora turned to me and asked if Santa existed.

“Tell me the truth,” she said, looking me straight in the eyes, “the absolute truth.”

This was a moment of reckoning. Do I continue to lie to this very intelligent child, knowing she will find out soon enough? Do I continue to justify my lie with half-truths about the “spirit of Santa in all of us” some such bullshit? Or do I give her what she is asking for and tell her the truth?

“No,” I confessed solemnly, “Santa is not real.”
“What?!” she exclaimed. “Why did you tell me? You should have lied.”
In that moment my heart broke. Seriously, that may have been one of the worse heartbreaks of my adult life. I could see that something broke in her too, her belief in magic. I stomped on her childhood imagination, her dreams of magical lands and mythical creatures. I was the worst mother ever.

“This means the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist either,” she concluded sadly without needing me to agree.

Oh no, I destroyed her innocence. I should have known better. Of course she didn’t want the truth. She was ten after all, and too smart to still believe in Santa Claus unless she was in conscientious denial. She wanted to believe. She wanted me to lie to her.

And that’s when I blurted out with all sincerity, “But fairies really do exist!”

She looked reasonably suspicious.

“I swear it!”

And I meant it. I have always believed and continue to believe in fairies. I’ve seen them with my own eyes. They’re everywhere. Not like Tinkerbell humanoids with translucent wings, but like glitter, puffs, flits and sparks (and sometimes translucent wings). You’ve probably seen them too, whether you knew it or not.

I’m not alone in my belief.

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You may have heard the saying that time is money, which is a great capitalist idiom to make sure that you aren’t wasting time being unproductive when you could be making money. But what about the opposite? Money is time. Which means that in order to make money, you need to invest time. And time is a commodity you can never get back. Time is our most precious resource. It allows us the ability to do the things we love that bring us joy. Most people want to make money so that they have more free time. But that’s the conundrum because making money uses up time. Henry David Thoreau famously wrote in Walden regarding cost and value, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

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You can work hard and hope to one day retire to a life of leisure. You can spend less and work less and live a life of leisure with less stuff. And/or, if you can figure it out, you can earn passive income, which is basically a stream of income that doesn’t cost you a lot of time.

The definition of passive income is earnings derived from sources or activities that require minimal ongoing effort or active participation after the initial setup. As an advocate of the slow living lifestyle, passive income is of great interest to me. Just the word passive gives off a certain vibe. You might imagine streams of money flowing towards you as you sit back and leisurely sip a cup of coffee or read a book or play with your kids

Why Do You Need Passive Income?

A great thing about passive income is that it allows you to make money on the side without burning out. You can keep your day job. With the economy as such, multiple streams of income are more important than ever. If you lose your job to AI or outsourcing, or if your company fails to keep up with recent tech advances and their stock plummets and they lay off 20% of their employees, you have something at least to float you for a while or subsidize your severance package while you look for more work or give up on the idea of working all together and buy an off grid home and grow all your own food.

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Throughout my adult life, I have had multiple income streams. I’ve never been the kind of person to have one full-time job. I usually work freelance or as a contractor. Because of this, I usually turned my hobbies into some kind of income generator. That doesn’t mean you have to capitalize on your hobbies. It’s nice to have some things that are just for you. But it does mean that you can. Some ways that I have received passive income include digital courses, resale, Airbnb, merch at local shops, books in print and online, crypto and my Roth IRA.

Basically, life is short. The whole point is to have more time to enjoy life, so pick something that you enjoy doing and see how you can make money from it on the side. Creating a new income source that stresses you out or you agonize over doing, is not worth it and is counter effective.

If you want to dive deeper into ways to make passive income, I have compiled an in-depth list for paid subscribers of 10 ways to make passive income based on research, 30+ years of adult life experience, and creative ingenuity. In this list I have included type of person who might enjoy this form of passive income, if you need a lot or a little investment upfront, if the return is minimal or high, and whether you need to invest minimal, mild, or mucho time to do it. Hopefully, this will help you determine which one or more is best for you.

Let’s dig in.

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If you’ve followed many of these posts in recent years, you might recall the lore: middle-aged couple and their tween uproot from comfortable life at the end of a cul-de-sac in a small mountain town less than one month into Covid and move into an unfinished off-grid home made of straw bales and cement.

It’s an adventure we’ve chronicled, told and re-told over and over because it seems to be, by far, the most interesting thing about me to other people despite not really being the center of my identity (yet).

We’re in year six of the experiment now and lately I’ve been running the numbers on how it’s gone so far. You can catch up on that here if you missed it:

The process also has me pondering alternate paths not taken. If this story were a Choose Your Own Adventure title, what would the alternate endings be? The Sliding Doors moment is pretty easy to imagine: what if we had simply never come across the enigmatic Craigslist ad selling a quirky shell of a straw bale off-grid home for the cost of a new car?

I asked a few LLMs to help me imagine two alternate scenarios. I checked in with Johanna and we agreed on what the two most likely pathways would have been:

Scenario 1 - Our family continues to stay in our rented home through the duration of Covid lockdowns and quarantines. During this period we focus our energies more on our love of travel. We surely would have taken lots of road trips as so many people did to escape the claustrophobia during those pandemic years. This was also already our pattern prior to Covid; we struggled to save much money, frequently choosing present experiences over future security.

Scenario 2 - Covid could just as easily trigger a strong nesting instinct (we did carry this out in our off-grid homestead to a significant extent) leading us to opt for a more conservative trajectory. We may have been able to strike a favorable rent-to-own arrangement with our friendly landlord for the home we rented in our small mountain tourist town.

I asked the AI models to help game out these two alternate adventures and compare and contrast them with the current reality, including lifestyle and financial impacts. I spent some time with Perplexity, correcting the off-base assumptions included in its original analyses, giving it as much real data as I could to work with. I even specifically asked it to take off its rose-colored glasses and refrain from blowing smoke up my ass.

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