I have lost my mind.
But I have found my body.
I have been living off-grid for thirteen days and it has been over a week since our solar panels couldn’t gather enough sunlight to charge our batteries anymore. Which means over a week without power which has required some adjusting. No, not some, a lot of adjusting, constantly. On the trivial end, I have since switched from my beloved coffee pot to an insulated pour-over, from an electric coffee grinder to a manual one. I don’t use my heating pad for cramps but have resorted to a hot water bottle and what feels like an endless stream of reheating a kettle, sometimes on the gas stove and sometimes the wood stove. My recently handwashed but wet underwear is hanging in our entry way. On a more serious note, we have a generator now to assist us until the sun comes back — thanks Grandpa! Each night we plug the fridge into an external battery, then as soon as the sun rises we flip on that noisy beast behind the woodpile so we can have Wifi and some power for the day. I have lost track of how many days it has been since I saw the sun last. We are moved in here, but not. My external studio/storage shed has heat now, but is stacked high with boxes of kitchenware I sometimes wonder if I will ever use again. I have cleared a small spot on my workbench for now just to have a separate space to write. I have painted just once at the kitchen table since we moved. I am living in an entirely new world.
I have also found myself moving more than I ever have on a daily basis. Everything I do requires a level of effort I was not familiar with prior to relocating here. I keep telling Spencer that it feels more akin to life after setting up camp on an island in the BWCA than it even remotely resembles my former life. I am learning that I can live with less, and less, and less, and then even less. I am also learning that I am infinitely capable of adapting to my circumstances.
Today was a day, however, where I decided I needed to complain. The expression burst out of me like a raging fire that had found oxygen. I fear I drove Spencer to run his errands in town earlier than he’d intended. This morning I was endlessly finding things wrong with our new living situation. There are too many things on the counters, it’s too dark, it’s too wet, the floor is too dirty and I can feel wood chips and dirt under my bare feet. There are charging cords and screws and boots and tools lying about. I have been purging, and packing, and moving and unpacking and relocating my things for months. I have taken a hiatus from work to make space for this move and all of that was clearly necessary but I haven’t created anything in what feels like an eternity and I feel I am losing connection to my purpose. I knew this day would come. The novelty has already begun to wear off and the cabin is more utilitarian than it is minimal and cozy anymore. I used to have fairy lights strung throughout the old farmhouse and I loved flipping them on to transform the doldrums of a cloud-heavy day into cozy, magical ones. Now I am running around making sure my rechargeable lamps are switched off if I have enough daylight to see what is necessary to see around me. Because soon I will be cooking dinner in the dark again and the generator will be switched off and if the lamps aren’t charged, I’m chopping vegetables with a headlamp on. Fine, but not ideal.
I have never thought about resources so much in my life. Not for this long. Fuel, power, water. I have learned it requires more power to run something with a heating element — so until we invest in more batteries and solar panels to sustain us here, it’s goodbye coffee pot, hair dryer, and heating pad. Washing dishes also requires quite a bit of water. You’ll want to use hot water to wash dishes, boiling is best. But that requires wood for the stove to heat the kettle, or propane to heat the gas stove.
And it’s not that we don’t have enough of these resources — except sunlight right now — the issue is that it requires more human energy to generate these resources.
So, I have found this to be a time where I am beginning to lose my mind, and find my body.
I now place buckets under the roofline to collect an abundance of rainwater to do dishes and stretch our drinking water. I can always split wood. I can focus my energy into my biceps while I crank my manual coffee grinder. I can breathe fresh air and look for the moon on my midnight walks to the outhouse. I am using my own body as a tool to make and be in my life more than I ever have before. My formerly modern conveniences gifted me plenty of time to use my brain, yet robbed me of a deeper connection to my physical self and that beautiful extension, the natural world. I now I find myself to be an integral part in the workings of the things that work for me. I have not even been living in this off-grid cabin for two weeks and already I am more in my body, more grounded, sleeping more soundly, and more connected to nature than ever in my daily life. I feel everything deeper, I am less lost in thought and more present. I find myself reaching for my phone less and staring out the window more. I am washing dishes and then washing underwear, I am pouring hot water over coffee grounds, I am creating an updraft in the wood stove so the cabin doesn’t fill with smoke every time I open it to throw another log on those glowing coals. More body, less mind.
A month ago I was wracked with anxiety as I prepared for this move. I was extremely worried I wasn’t going to be able to hack it out here. I am sensitive and tender, I don’t see myself as some back woods wonder. I twist my ankles easily and I often don’t feel strong or tough. But my understanding of effort is changing here already. Because effort from overthinking is far more exhausting than the effort that it takes to live a life this close to the land. It reminded me of the reason I decided to do this in the first place… I just wanted to see if I could. I am terrified of the unknown but I am also magnetized by it. To me, stepping through that glorious portal between predictability and into a great mystery is part of the miracle of being human. We don’t know if we can stand the heat until we get in hot water. I am becoming addicted to experiencing my own tenacity just as I have in the wilderness. I have also found that I especially love to indulge in the feeling of doing something when people tell me it will be too hard for me. I love the challenge of showing myself how much grit I am made of. I love the feeling of life cracking me wide open until tears stream down my cheeks merely from the sheer wonder of it all. I am reminded once again that the idleness that comes from fear only leads to stagnancy which is the exact opposite of living. Change, especially the kind that scares us, well that is what it is to be alive, my friends.
This morning, as I squatted to fill the kettle with rainwater, I felt the muscles in my back stretch and my spine straighten in a way it only does when I am in the wilderness. I realized I have scarcely looked at my face in the mirror in days. My curls are constantly being rehydrated by mist in the air and lately appears more moppy than styled. I have been too present to entertain so many things that used to make me feel anxious or guilty or shameful, the kinds of thoughts that arrive in idle moments when my brain is searching for some evidence that I am not safe or not good. I am less hesitant. I am more eager. I am becoming braver by the day.
I may have lost my mind.
But thankfully, I have found my body.