out of the trees

I have just spent the longest period of my life away from any town or city or reasonable facsimile of the thing the folks in my planting camp longingly referred to as "civilization".

"Where?" you ask. Well, not quite - but close. Halfway between Mackenzie (out there) and Fort Ware (waaaaaaaaaay out there) there is a bridge, which will be known here as "The Mesalinka #1 bridge", the beside of which we were encamped, the off of which we jumped. Absolutely God-wonderful breathtaking. Breathe that air for a week, and see if you ever want to go back.

You would thing from knowing my mental bent that now, sitting at a computer in Prince George, I would be off ranting and raving about the evils of this "civilization", throwing in the odd anectadote about four timberwolf pups I saw on the road three days ago, or about Werner and Rosy, who live just up the road from the Mez One Bridge in a log cabin Werner built with only a chainsaw, using logs he'd felled and skidded with a late-eighties hatchback with no windows.

I'm not, however, spending too much time these days thinking about the simple life. Instead, I'm thinking about character and about how with a generous application of the human freedom to choose, I can change just about anything (even the world) "with my own two hands".

You see, it is easy for me to see this site as just a way to vent - to release a bit of mental pressure so that I can feel I'm sending out "a message" to the web. I get on here and I blather away about this and that, but do I really work to change the things I want to see changed? Am I willing to make hard, daily choices in order to see this fantastical "simple life" occur, to see injustices stopped, to break the bondage of myself and my fellowfolk to consumer, conformist culture, and to live instead a life of service? Will I see my life - my every moment - as a talent which I have the priviledge and joy to use not for self-gratification and aggrandizement, but for the good of others? Will I throw myself, body and soul, into painting or writing or whatever in order to fill up the world with more of myself, or will I do those things in order to diminish myself and allow the world to overflow, through me, with a greater sense of the Truth and of Love?

In less than a week, I will be twenty-six. I spent a jolly few moments of my life (between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two), claiming that I would die when I was twenty-five. At the time, I figured I was being cryptical, mystical and prophetic. I thought that my words made me special and gave me meaning. That was, I think, a fantasy. Lives were not meant to be lived in fantasy, but in the hard-knock world of real life, where actions have consequenses and morality is a universal current which I can toil uselessly against, or which I can accept.

As soon as I write all that, I'm tempted to say that my twenty-sixth birthday is going to be some sort of symbolic end to fantasy - that I'll now choose to really LIVE in real life. But again I catch myself inflating words, sentimentalizing away my responsibility to the truth. And the truth is, the truth is about today. Right now. Tommorow doesn't exist, and today is rapidly becoming the yesterday that I've created. So today, folks, I'm going to try to live humbly and love ridiculously under the philosopher's creed - with my death always before my eyes.