PP #51: Beatific/Beautiful
Project: Pioneer #51, September 3, 2024 Tuesday 9am
We had our first visitors here in our pioneer enclave, after being at this lifestyle for a year. We see our families often, but until now, none have ventured into our world. It can be a little hurtful at times, but completely understandable. This life can be intimidating, and it’s not for everyone. It takes one out of their comfort zone, especially those who are only familiar with the sticks and bricks trodden path of normalcy. Let’s talk about that programming.
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. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.
As our visitors arrived, the clouds moved away to yield the sun. It was a beautiful day of togetherness, walks through the woods, paddleboats, laughter, and the non-device nature wonderment of small children. Giavana and I sat outside with our guests—my daughter and son-in-law and their girls, dining at the picnic table, talking about life. Their big shepherd enjoyed the outdoor ambiance, and our little Pia may have gotten a little jealous at first. The summer was full of wonderful memories, and that one closed it out in perfection. I’ll be forever thankful for that day.
It was an ending of sorts. Summer’s end. The woods were full of campers and it was loud. Lots of people, just blowing off steam, happy to be away from it all for a brief time. It seemed to go on forever, starting on Thursday morning, until on Monday when the last stragglers pulled away, sadly, heading back to the pulling vortex of reality, and left us alone once again. I puttered about outside, cleaning up. White dead ashen embers in the firepit and the children’s long, thin marshmallow sticks propped up on lawn chairs all a sad reminder of our special day. I had told them how delicious those blackened marshmallows they had prepared for me were. The hammock those kids enjoyed so much now sat still, alone, unattended, perhaps catching its breath after a substantial workout, so much attention as those gleeful kids shrieked and pushed it to its limits.
I also said goodbye to a few fellow pioneers, heading out for warmer climes now that summer is drawing its curtain. One fellow was traveling with just his basset hound, lost after losing his wife, no longer permitting himself a home, riding out his time in that old class A. My old best friend (the basis for the hero Shayne in Farawayer) and his wife now finally, finally retired and just left for their countrywide RV journey. Dubuque, Iowa at last report. I’m happy for them, envious, and look forward to their reports.
The distractions of summer concerts and festivals now behind us, Giavana and I will focus more on the future—near and far. The election is a big factor, I’ve covered all that and what our options will be if it goes one way or the other. Our next big task is to begin organizing and inventorying our meager possessions, our minimalist, prepper things, in order to prepare for our move to a new winter site. We’ll empty and clean this White House home from stem to stern, fore and aft, inside and out to prepare her for winter. The move will happen in October, next month, as far as setting up in the new place. We’ll leave for a getaway in November, to be out of the country for the election, safe and cozy by a lake, a much needed break.
Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden (a treasure, and one of my favorite books) about being simple and minimalist as a way of resisting unjust economic and political systems. What he was saying is that by buying into the pressures to have more and more, you enslave yourself and put yourself under the control of others—employers, creditors, those you’re trying to keep up with, your own human built-in greed and lust for “things.” It’s that pulling vortex I mentioned earlier, the sucking whirlpool. He said it leads to people becoming “sleepers” who are eventually absent from their existence, forced into a life where they must get up each day and go through the same Matrix, Groundhog Day routine, and they become numb to it, joyless, stressed, numb to all the beauty and goodness in this world. And that was back in 1854! It’s so much more true now, on steroids. May he rest in peace.
Maybe all those words I read as a boy and later as a lost, disaffected young man after my military service are rising up through my subconscious, in rebellion, and have driven us to this pioneer path we’ve undertaken. My Side of the Mountain, On the Road, Walden, and other wonderful books I read during those times. Maybe it’s because we seem to be at the pinnacle of what those books, and other, more dystopian ones (like 1984 and Handmaid’s Tale) all foretold so long ago. Maybe Farawayer was the bubbling up of all that from within me. Maybe this alternative life is our escape—actually, it is, I’ll admit, and it’s wonderful.
Regardless, that path to dystopia in the books I read is indisputably happening not just here, but around the world. The USA is the grand prize, the big domino that would cause all others to topple. Evil knows it, big autocracy knows it, big money knows it. This has been a slow freight train, coming for a very long time. We can derail it, I hope. We need the young to rise up, finish what the hippies and beats started, and do it right this time. Take back their future, fight for it. Us oldsters need to try to gain penance for contributing to it, not fighting hard enough, and stand by their sides.
Let’s be clear—there isn’t any Doctor Evil/Gru evil genius superhero plotting all this behind a green curtain. It’s the organic outgrowth of out of control, unbridled greed, mostly now in corporate form, since they’ve been recognized as “people too” by the Supreme Court. “People” with zero empathy, knowing only greed, lust for more, more, more, and now driven by artificial intelligence. Giavana and I watched a western movie last night, and framed it in what life may be like to come, from a prepper perspective. Not many will survive that, we’re too soft, too reliant on tech.
Back to our visitors. When I’m with my adult kids, especially when I see what fantastic, amazing, loving parents they are, my mind always wanders to going back. I’d like to be their father now, with all I’ve learned since. How good I’d be! We have our children too young, again part of that societal programming: school, career, marriage, kids. We move from one form of being controlled to another, throughout our lives. Feed that tax machine for the wealthy, feed those collection plates, feed that military-industrial war machine with our working kids’ bodies and minds. Are you still figuring out why the wealthy are so against any form of birth control or women making their own decisions? It’s not their kids going off to get maimed and killed in those oil wars.
It’s a trap, always was. CEO pay used to be a reasonable three times average worker pay. Now it’s 344 times more! Wall Street profits have gone up 3,800% since 1980 (the beginning of the Reagan age of extreme greed) while worker pay has gone up only 16%. There used to be no billionaires, now they’re consolidating into their own hateful little unhappy space army. Three families here in the US have more money than half the 330 million population combined. The money you make and taxes you pay, your slave wage contributions, almost all go to corporate subsidies for big pharma, big military, and here you are worried that immigrants might get the meager Social Security they’re paying into, and some poor single mom might get food stamps until she can afford child care to get a job. Only one party is now back to fighting for the working people, fighting against all that, and it’s not the party led by a billionaire that’s trying to cancel overtime pay and socialist “entitlements” like unemployment payments, Social Security, Medicare, and veteran’s and other disability.
I digress. I long to go back and do it again, especially for those kids. I wish to be reincarnated, if that’s what it takes. Maybe.
I’ve posited in my musings here about spirituality and the afterlife. I’ve thought deeply on these topics since childhood, out of fear and wonder. After all I’ve seen and experienced in these many decades, and studying the experiences of those who have briefly passed and come back, I think I know the deal. The only thing that makes sense to me is that there is some form of afterlife, and it is utopian. This life is in preparation for that, because for utopia to remain perfect, only the perfected can pass into it. If you haven’t evolved sufficiently, you retain some of what you’ve learned in that secret subconscious and DNA programming, and you’re reborn to work at it. God doesn’t interfere, that would ruin the recipe, we’re at the mercy of our own decisions, fate and how we handle the circumstances that are thrown at us in random fashion.
The cookbook to perfection has been given to us in many forms (all corrupted by humans of course, to some extent)—the Commandments, the Beatitudes, Torah, Koran, on and on. It’s all the same song. Be good, be kind, be compassionate, be moral. If I’m wrong, what’s the down side—trying to be a more perfect person? I’ll take the ‘L’ there, if so. If I’m right, the reward is eternal. Read or listen to the book, After (and others like it) and tell me you’re not convinced. We don’t need to participate in unpleasant rituals we don’t understand, or support uber-wealthy cult-like organizations. We can be a religion unto ourselves, so much easier. Christlike.
Imagine the world we’d live in if more people adopted this theory, as well as similar ideas such as in Buddhist teachings. Semi-utopia, right here. No more greed, wars, mistreatment and violence of human on human.
We don’t know for sure if there is reincarnation. There’s plenty of evidence on that as well. We don’t know if there’s a God. We only choose to believe what we choose to believe. But I do know one form of reincarnation is real. We wake up every day reborn, after whatever happens in our sleep, the deep secrets in our subconscious taking over, perhaps adjusting us, guiding us, teaching us. Every day we arise, reborn, with the chance to begin anew, to be better, to fight off the stressors that certainly will come until we lay our heads down again. If we can just make it through that short period of a few hours, beatific, beautiful, a perfect person, being kind, generous, moral for just that few hours, perhaps there’s the chance that we’ll do it again the next day, and again, until it is habit. Until it becomes clear that this is the way to happiness.
“An honest man hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.” ― Henry David Thoreau
This pioneer journey continues…
Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!
Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.
If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.
You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.
When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.