PP #45: Beauty All Around
Project: Pioneer #45, July 22, 2024 Monday 9am
Just beyond the chest-high legion layer of juvenile corn stalks, our valley sits, fronted by a sentinel forest of hunter green trees. Our pioneer home in the woods lays nestled behind, obscured. The rearguard mountain range runs behind us, striped by sparse cloud cover and the sun above in a brilliant space-blue sky. There is beauty all around, at least for now…
Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Most posts are free, more personal posts are to reward our loyal paid subscribers. You can listen to and subscribe to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others. Note: The audio voiceover/podcast for this post will appear this weekend when I'm back in the pioneer studio.
On the approach to our home, a lake shimmers, scattering the sunlight in tiny prisms on the surface. The small pond beside it resonates with croaking frogs. Humans are coming. Similar chatter from the trees, owls and everything with wings celebrating the gift of a new morning.
Just before dawn, Pia and I emerge from our White House RV home for her morning relief. Lately, there is more wildlife to greet us. Last week Pia abruptly stopped at the foot of the stairs, gazing at the wood’s edge at the rear of our home. A beautiful doe stared back, just thirty feet away. We all stood, transfixed. It was like those two were communicating on some wavelength imperceptible to me. They both broke off simultaneously, turning their heads as the telepathic conversation ended, to go about their business. It’s disconcerting when the wildlife begin to acts in ways other than we are accustomed. Perhaps it’s a harbinger. We probably won’t know for sure until it’s too late, unless we reverse course, somehow.
Sometimes we drive, often we walk, just to get out and appreciate the staggering beauty all around us. It’s incredible to behold, and it goes and goes, lush in every conceivable shade of green, without a visible trace of our human presence. Giavana and I chose this unique life out of fear for what may come, but it’s been a blessing regardless.
And now, this week, the immense ocean at sunrise, seagulls calling and feeding, no humans have come yet to litter the beach. The sun peeks up over the horizon from off to the east, to see if the coast is clear. The waves rush the shore, retreat, then hush for a moment, before doing so again, and again. The very cycle of it is familiar to me. It’s the cycle of the peaceful whispering breeze through the trees in our pioneer RV home. All this before the humans awake, and overtake nature with the violence of their presence.
If you look at our swirling blue and white globe from space, you can see—it’s apparent that it is one living organism, surrounded by the black void of space. As with all other complex organisms, it is composed of other organisms—a synergistic ecosystem of life, functioning in harmony. It is life. It is alive.
Our bodies are similar, harboring living things inside and on the surface, in the forest of our body hair, among our cells. Bacteria, viruses, microbiomes, fungi, even tiny insects call us home. We cannot survive without some of them, and some may consume us. There are ten times more microbes in our body than human cells. We take in a flood of them with every breath, every bite of food, every drink.
If any of these guests in our own biosystem steps out of line and attacks, the battle begins. White blood cells rush to defend us, to kill the invader that attempts to throw our systems into chaos and eventual demise.
It’s the same with our beautiful blue sphere. We are among the guests, along with those owls and frogs and trees and corn. The Gaia theory presents that the earth is a complex living organism comprised of many smaller life forms. It is synergistic, complex, and self-regulating, just like our bodies.
Nature heals us, the ocean always accelerating recovery from any mental or physical injury. It pampers us with compassion, but as we more and more become a threat to it, we see it lashing out, an angry parent that has lost its temper. Then she whispers with those rushing waves and whispering winds, a mother trying to sooth its child, hoping it will sleep, hoping it will behave.
It warns us with its violence in tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, fires, earthquakes and erupting volcanoes. The ocean rises up in warning, smashing the gaudy homes that have intruded too close, carrying those polluting people-viruses and their dirty diapers, and destroys them. Gaia. Then nature retreats, calm and peaceful once again, waiting, watching, hoping we’ll heed the warning, and use our alleged intelligence to take the hint and change our destructive behavior.
Some call it God, referencing those terrible Biblical floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and fires. Perhaps they are one and the same, or two forces beyond our comprehension, working in harmony, sending a message we refuse to hear.
And now the same beautiful beach at sunset. Piles of trash in the sand, plastic and dirty diapers offending the gulls. Massive oil tankers on the horizon, spilling their waste into the water below and air above.
Nothing matches the peace and serenity of diving a tropical reef. The colors of the coral and marine life are spectacular, and there is no sound other than the breathed bubbles and occasional whale song. Everything moves in slow motion and flows in harmony down there—nature is eternal, yet it takes its time and we humans only rush and rush our short lives away.
In my last visits to those reefs that I’ve been diving for many decades, what I remember is gone. Grey coral now, bleached through the oceans we’ve warmed close to boiling. The beautiful fish that feed on the coral had left, of course. The few that remained stare bleakly, questioningly. Why, humans? To what purpose? It was stark there, like the deep winter up top, death and stillness. Beer cans and old tires prominent, without the beauty. I haven’t gone back since, because it figuratively broke my heart and my heart isn’t in the best shape for diving literally. Perhaps we fade out together, my beloved ocean and I.
We see it in the woodland too—morning’s peace broken by gaudy displays of blinking LED lights announcing someone’s preference for one thing or another, humans who come to the natural peace of the forest with their loud trucks and motorcycles, power tools and blasting music, their beer cans often strewn along the path. Chopping on the trees, screwing their flags and signage into the precious living bark and core. Seuss-like, comical if not so sad.
We are uniquely different from any other life form on this planet. Are we outcasts from another, faraway place and perhaps this terrible behavioral inclination is why? The native cultures respected nature above all, and were wiped out by those who did not, we who remain. The mighty dinosaurs once ruled, but were extinguished by nature. This is how it was before us, and how it will be after we’re gone.
The summer marches on, always begged ahead through the frozen gray sticks of winter, but moves too quickly, or we cause it to with our hurry. We seemingly get bored with it, the lush beauty, lured away by the peace of the kids going back to school, the spectacular fall foliage, football, Halloween, turkey, the warmth of the holidays, promise of a new and hopefully better year to come. It’s a trap, though, a lure to hurry us along to the cold emptiness of January to March.
Especially in this country, we hurry, we rush, we’re forced into a fast pace of stress by the capitalistic out of control forces hell-bent on more profit, more, more. People in countries like Italy and Spain live far longer, due to their refusal to work themselves to death, their long vacations, lunch breaks, easier flow, better health care. Our life expectancy in the US is now 79 and dropping fast, as our food and lifestyle kill us off early, along with the Gaia forces we’re bringing on ourselves with our abuse of this beautiful host planet we all share.
I’m hoping there’s more beyond, that our physical shell is a mere host for our spirit, and there is eternal beauty in the beyond like those peaceful coral reefs I enjoyed, and the companionship of those who have already moved on. It keeps me going, it helps me to forgive the ugliness I see.
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” —Jesus, Luke 23:34
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