This is a post about posting, about intent more than content.
When I began this blog almost three years ago it followed on the heels of the death of Bus Companion, and much of it was written in the months that followed. Living in the bus was an experience I had enjoyed and wanted to share.
The last year-and-a-half has seen very little travel. I tried my hand at living a more stationary life in a house back east for a while but was drawn back to the bus. I returned last fall to the Southwest.
Yet I almost stopped traveling. I rooted myself this past winter in an RV park in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Except for living in a bus my life became more and more every day like that of other lives around me -- house dwellers and RVers alike. There was little reason then to write about so mundane an existence. Life in a Volkswagen Bus wasn't much different than any other life, it seemed
That is changing and will I think continue to change. The world is changing. The U.S. is changing. And if my travels on rolling Michelins are fewer, the travels of my mind are greater.
It seems we are headed if not into a great abyss at least toward a critical change point in history.
Mankind in the last one hundred years has created a great and complex system that houses, feeds and clothes 7 billion+ people. Only a small fraction of that population today can sustain itself outside of the system.
If and when it falters as it surely must -- for no system built on growth on a planet with finite resources can indefinitely sustain itself -- all chaos will ensue. Some must be prepared and ready for what will follow.
I came across a writer a few days ago puzzled by the failure of so many to think critically about the complex issues facing us. Why, he ponders, at a time when critical thinking is most needed do we barricade ourselves behind closed minds?
He calls such obstinate non-think Arrogant Ignorance -- holding to beliefs and opinions without questioning them and reinforcing our ignorance by repeating the arguments that support our views.
One of the reasons for arrogant ignorance, he suggests, is our comfort. We defend where we stand when we have achieved a place in the system. We stop thinking. We become like horses wearing blinders so as not to be spooked by what is going on around us.
There is a price to pay for such near-sightedness. The unexamined life, as Socrates observed, is not worth living. It is not fulfilling. The dreams of youth are locked away, and we live soon forgotten lives.
We seek comfort. We seek security -- from want, fear, sickness, loneliness and death. Real life offers no security. Only joy.
Seeking such security makes cowards of all.
Life is and should be its own reward. But one has to wake to enjoy it. And that's where the examined life comes in, waking to the power and beauty, before we fall into our final sleep.
These blog pages will now be renewed with stories along life's mental as well as as concrete highway. The bus is where I wake up mornings to see the sun rising over Turtleback mountain, to the cooing of hundreds of doves -- palomas -- to the flowing of the Rio Grande, to strange characters, men and women, who come and go in my life carrying their thoughts and dreams and puzzling in wonder.
The examined life only gets richer day by day by day.
Welcome to Part 2: Life Beyond the Volkswagen Bus.
