OMG!!!!!!!!

It's happening! I could say "Finally", but really, timing is everything, and the right time is apparently now here. We are under contract for selling our house and land on the rocky New Mexico hillside known as Cerro Chato, and on our personal road called Grateful Way. And we are deeply grateful.

The desire to sell arose in 2014, and the plan was to buy a house in Santa Fe in order to be able to keep working and to be able to have easy access to the services and conveniences of town life after, then, 23 years on the land. All that changed of course, and our travels began. Now, 5 years later, we are about to embark on the next adventure, and on the new book of our lives we have begun writing.

Assuming all goes well.......and we all believe it will, it's possible that we could be vacating the house by mid August. The new plan is to buy a Class B motor home ( a van RV) and to head off into the wilds of our imaginations and of the incomparable natural beauty that North America offers. There will presumably need to be a transition time between leaving our 28 year home and acquiring and outfitting/provisioning the van, before driving away from Santa Fe - we guess(?) - into the next unknown.

Right now everything feels a bit dreamlike. Also a little anticlimactic. Huh. Ok. It's happening. One foot in front of the other. A lot to do to empty the house and shed, move stuff, sell stuff, donate stuff, give stuff away, keep stuff for the van, store stuff in town. Besides that though there is a part of me that can't help but feel incredulous that there are actual real people, right next door so to speak in Madrid, who love our place and want to make it their own. And they are not acting impulsively. No, they have been out here numerous times, thought it all through for weeks, and are prepared to buy the property at full price (which is a steal of sorts), as is, with no contingencies. Exactly what  I've been saying for years that I wanted.

Sadly, our own daughter has always been something of a naysayer regarding our humble home, with an attitude of "who would want to buy that place!?" And even Nancy has been inclined to think we'd need to do all manner of "improvements" to the place in order to make it sell-able. My own approach has always been that it is what it is, it ain't  Sunset Magazine, and the right people will appreciate it for what it is, and at the price it is. And now that's precisely what has happened. It's just a little hard to believe.

The couple who will buy "the old David place", as it will always be known by some out here in deference to the original builders, are experienced grown ups with talents in multiple directions, including gardening and building, as well as herbalism and Feldenkrais. Al has been rehabbing a commercial/residential building on Main Street in Madrid for the past year, and it's now on the market. The photos look beautiful, and there might already be a buyer through our realtor. (All this could happen very quickly). We get paid when they sell their place.

They are eager to put down roots, have looked at numerous places over the past year, and found nothing they liked until they saw our place less than 2 months ago. Hard as it may be for some to believe they fell in love with it. And while they clearly appreciate and love it for what it is (Sarah has been in tears on at least two occasions while visiting the house), they surely have their own vision of what they can turn it into for themselves. A win/win situation is what it truly looks, and feels, like.

So Nancy and I are now working on the assumption that we will be ready to vacate by August 15th (whether that actually happens or not), and are getting busy clearing out stuff in preparation. Yikes! Suddenly it all feels overwhelming.

Where To Be?

(This was actually written several months ago now, while still in Thailand, but I didn't publish it til today......see next post with other new developments.......)

In reflecting on what I enjoy about being in Thailand, and how being here effects me in different ways, I'm aware that this lush, moist, yin, expansive, outward leaning life of the past 4 years may be diminishing in its constant appeal. It's not that I don't still love it, because I do. It's more that some of its qualities have begun to seem as though they need a different kind of dynamic balance. Maybe spending 6 or 9 months a year in Asia is more than I now want? Maybe not. My energy and focus have shifted toward what I am envisioning as our new way of life in the States, and I am a bit eager to jump into it and see if it will really work for us. The initial experiment will doubtless take a few months, and so we are talking about not returning to Asia in the Fall of 2019, but rather giving a proper trial to van RV living over a likely course of time.

I have been saying for these 4 years that I don't really want to be in the States at all, and that living – more or less full time – in Asia would suit me just fine. We have both been saying that we feel done with our house and land, and it is this feeling that has at least in significant part motivated our travels and explorations abroad. I'm now thinking that, while our mutual feeling has been accurate in terms of describing something about our future, a future away from Cerro Chato and away from 36 Grateful Way, it may be that it is necessary for me to have arrived at this internal point, and for Nancy to have previously reached her point of letting go, in order for us to finally be on target with selling our place. As Nancy has put it, we now have a clear direction, something concrete that we are moving toward. (I thought I had my direction, but Nancy has always put the breaks on that; well, at least “always” once Elijah was born).

In coming to terms with the necessity to be in the States part of the year at least, the camper van RV theme arose last summer in Santa Fe, when I understood that I needed to find a way to be in the States that would make sense for me, and for us. It was 3 years ago, after our first trip, that it dawned on me that we were, in fact, living as nomads. We were renting our house and so were effectively “homeless”; we moved around Santa Fe and around the country a lot, staying a while here and a while there; we left again to return to Asia, and then again back to the US. We had not set out to become nomads, and the idea was not at first appealing, but the truth of it became apparent and so there we were. Now, 3 years later, we are intending to embrace the nomadic, “houseless” life in America with a teeny tiny home on wheels. (Please don't mis-understand this as relentless moving around; the choice of moving or staying put is ours to make at all times).

I believe we are both excited about this new direction, and it does lend itself to a certain enthusiasm about being in America, which I clearly have needed if I were going to stay there for some months at a time. Where the road may lead we of course cannot say, but I think we have become at least somewhat comfortable with leaving things open, and the new adventure has a call that I can hardly resist.

Two And A Half Years Later.............

We're on the verge, it seems, of the next major leap, or change, or book, as Nancy originally named it, of our lives. We've been talking about the meaning of this next stage, in political/personal, spiritual, and ecological terms. Some things are becoming more clearly imagined. Family. Our impact on the planet. Logical next steps in our lifestyle, given our last 28 years of living off grid, of pioneering a piece of raw, inhospitable, rugged, harsh New Mexico land, of having taken a nearly 4 year break from living in the house we built, of spending significant time in Asia; given that we will return very soon to this house and land in order to sell it and begin that next new book of our lives.

The thought that we may not return to Asia later this year, as has been our recent habit. The idea that we may instead remain in the States, in the Van RV we're planning to live in, and see what it's like to do that, and to not travel by air so far, and to settle in, after some fashion, to a new way of life. A way of life that is consistent with our way of life to date, and even, I affirm, a next logical evolutionary leap in our way of living.

Since we are indeed destroying our planet, and leaving a legacy of despair and difficulty to our children and grandchildren (Nancy remains more hopeful than I tend to be about this, believing that the infinite creative potential of humanity may still offer as yet unknown positive possibilities......) then what can we do, that is, what can Nancy and I do that is within the scope of making sense for ourselves, that will be consistent with the magnitude of the losses and changes we are painfully aware of? The way of life we are imagining next for ourselves, that of living nomadically in a rather small vehicle, makes a great deal of sense for us. We both wish to live more and more consistently with our renunciate selves, while appreciating that this choice has not only concrete implications in and for the material world, but that it has also potently symbolic and ritual meaning for the psyche and soul especially of our American countrymen. What statement do we wish to make with how we choose to continue to live on Earth, now, in Her decline, and in our individual ever more assured declines?

Simplify, simplify, simplify, has been one of my mantras these last few years, increasing in volume and intensity with each passing year that we have lived so simply, and comfortably, and minimally in the world, and have not felt or been deprived, and have enjoyed ourselves, and have been healthy and creative and compassionate. In other words, we haven't sacrificed anything of value in order to do this, but instead have increased our appreciation of the value and quality of our lives. We wish to continue this development, and we believe that downsizing even further in what we call our home is the best way that we can now do this. My wish, or one of them at this point, is to be houseless, but not homeless. (Nancy says that this move into a more minimal living arrangement is still a bit of an experiment for her. No way to know now where exactly it will lead).

Personally, I do not want the responsibilities (one could say the entrapments) of house ownership, or the expenses, or the energy consumption demanded by it, or the wasted – for me – thinking and imagination required by it. I don't need it to ground me, or to define me, or to shelter me, or to perform any function at all for me, and so I wish to be free of it.

I don't want to consume more and more of anything. I rather wish to consume as little as possible to keep me comfortable (by my own definition), safe and nimble, and thereby continue my personal revolution of transformation of the consumerist mentality now more universally embraced around the world. When the Idiot Bush 2 told us all to go shopping after 9/11, he actually knew precisely what he was talking about, in order to facilitate the endless rapacious expansion of American, and now global consumerism, the very heart and blood of the endless wealth expansion of the 1%, and perhaps the most fundamental enemy of the Earth and of life on Her. Much more so, I suggest, than the often touted over population “issue”. I maintain that there are more than enough resources on Earth – or.....there were? - to sustain the entirity of Her populations, but that the insanely misguided mismanagement of these resources may be the single ecological issue underlying all others. To put it simply, but in much less fashionable terms, greed. And the corollary of more and more, and insatiable, desires. Which of course become imagined needs. Blah blah blah.

We intend to move forward into greater simplicity and into the greater expression of native intelligence and common sense. I'm grateful that we are able to do this (well, it's a bit speculative at the moment, but not entirely unprecedented; we shall see), as clearly not everyone is. We apparently need to remain out of the box even in the latter/final stage of life. And why be surprised by this?