15 Reasons Off-Grid Living Might be for You:
What Compels Me to Live this Way?
On the remote land at Wild Mountain where I camped for 10 days last week in southwest Colorado, there is a small hogan-shaped cabin. It is a long way from the road and down the slope of the hill, not particularly accessible. They currently use it as a small meeting area and storage space beside the outdoor kitchen. I learned on this recent visit that this was the first structure built on the property. It was inhabited by Linda. Linda lived and died in that cabin alone for 30 years without plumbing and with only a small battery system for electricity. Wild Mountain is adjacent to the San Isabel National Forest at 9,500 feet where the storms come in fast and harsh and frequently.
Thirty years! She lived there in wild solitude away from modernity and the usual comforts of the world without television, phone or internet. Nada. It’s crazy!
And I was totally jealous.
I am a hermit at heart, a recluse, drawn to the wild places, the minimal, the core essence of existence. If you follow the occult, my moon is in the earthy sign of Taurus. I am also a nine, The Hermit in the major arcana. And this archetype suits me well. Like the little old witch that lives at the edge of the forest, I long to need nothing but the company of trees, ravens, and lizards, mixing my medicinal plants into powerful potions and communing with the ancestors.
Does astrology and numerology explain my desire to live on the outskirts, one foot in and one foot out of society? Was I born this way? Why do I have this innate desire to live like this?
In the seventies, my parents bought an old house in the pastoral suburbs of the lower Hudson Valley outside New York City. They fixed up the house, built a deck, grew a large garden, raised rabbits, fixed up a red VW bug, sewed their own clothes, read Mother Earth News and Organic Gardening magazines, canned vegetables, heated the house with wood they gathered themselves and other such homesteading activities.
When I asked my mother what drew them-- two people of the Silent Generation, a cop from Yonkers and an artist from Brooklyn-- to this path, my mother replied, “I was always creative. Always weird.” My mother (also a Taurean moon) was ahead of her time. She didn’t get ideas to DIY homestead from anywhere other than her own creative unconventional thinking. She felt like an outsider in the world, always a little different, and so perhaps outside was where she felt most comfortable. I can relate.
This time of my life was also before the divorce, before my brother left for the army and when I was still engulfed with the joys of young childhood. Is my desire to return to the land a desire to return to the happy memories of childhood? Is this passion something I subconsciously inherited from my mother?
When I asked if any of our ancestors worked the land, she vehemently doubted it. Jews were prohibited from owning land in the old country. “Maybe Israel,” she said.
In my junior year of college, longing to connect to my roots, I journeyed to Israel to live on a Kibbutz and labor in the fields picking cherries and apricots. Is my passion for the land connected to my ancestors?
Upon graduation, I immediately made my way west to try urban life in the “small” city of Seattle, but my journey north to Alaska was inevitable. When I learned that everyone lived off the grid in Alaska, I knew I had to go. The pull toward feral isolation was strong in me.
In the enormously vast, dark, subarctic cold, Alaska was a true initiation. Alaska gave new meaning to the word wilderness. Like my parent’s unconventional move to homestead an acre of land in the suburbs of New York City, so was my move to Alaska. A girl from the suburbs with minimal outdoor experience other than 7 years at sleepaway camp in the Catskills, I was suddenly chopping wood, carrying water, using an outhouse, navigating grizzly bears, moose and winter locomotion.
I’m lucky that Alaska is where I met my match. From the start, Eric, also from the suburbs and often as out of place as me, was someone who shared my spirit for the edges, the wilds, the remote corners of the world.
There was a time when I leaned more toward the “prepper” label. Preppers are expecting the apocalypse, the fall out, the inevitable collapse of society. And part of me really felt like I needed to be prepared for the end of the world. I relished the independence from the structures that others relied on, knowing I would be ready when all else failed.But that sense of doom has evolved greatly in the last couple of years.
My reason for living off the grid is no longer in preparation for a possible dystopic future, but a utopic future. The one I hope for is a return to the old ways of living in equitable communities and in right relationship with the Earth.
I live connected to elements. I live in the cycles of daylight and seasons. I watch the moon rise and set again and I practice my spirituality based on its path. I observe which flowers will bloom when in which year according to how much rainfall we get. I am aware of the drought and watch my garden flounder. I carve paths through sagebrush and watch the distant route of walking rain at my back, thunder in my step, chased by lightning. I speak to the hummingbirds who visit me at dawn and watch the ravens return to roost at dusk. My little desert utopia.
I still don’t have the answer; I still don’t know why I’m a weird backwoods hermit person and what draws me to this lifestyle. But good thing for me, weird backwoods hermits inhabit the mystery; they are at home with the vast wilderness of the unknown.
You don’t need to move to a strawbale home in the desert, a cottage at the edge of the woods or a hogan-shaped lodge on the slope of a wild mountain to live a sustainable lifestyle in right relationship with the Earth. That isn’t realistic for most. Is it for you?
15 Reasons Off-Grid Living Might be for You:
1. You love living close to nature and being in tune with the elements.
2. You don’t mind making sacrifices of comfort and don’t expect off grid life to be like life on the grid.
3. You enjoy creating and building things yourself.
4. You love learning about alternative off grid systems like water catchment, solar power, compost toilets, permaculture, geothermal energy, biogas, etc.
5. You don’t mind and might even enjoy chopping wood and hauling water and all the extra work involved if maintaining your own utilities.
6. Though you can live off grid in a variety of landscapes, places without the grid are usually isolated and you should probably enjoy remote rural living.
7. You have the ability to work from home.
8. You enjoy getting your hands dirty (and your hair, and your nails, and your clothes, etc.).
9. You are willing to adjust accordingly with the seasons, rushing in the fall to stock up for winter, busy in spring to prepare for summer, quiet in winter settling into the dark.
10. You are always looking for ways to live and think more independently.
11. You have enough physical energy to do the extra work involved.
12. You are a minimalist and don’t need a lot of “things” to make you happy.
13. You are seeking more financial freedom.
14. You want less stress in your life.
15. Bonus: you are an introvert.