It is getting towards the end of the first week of December and 2 of the 4 cabin log walls are up now. I spent the last few days camping up in York Gulch constructing my temporary winter shelter. Once finished I plan on camping there 2-3 days per week.
I have been asked by many here in Idaho Springs and back home why if I have 2 places to live in Idaho Springs do I need yet another place to stay. And, why would I want to camp out in the middle of nowhere...and to boot in the winter of all times?
Well, my answer is that I wanted to build a "house" with my own 2 hands for the first time in my life. I want the satisfaction that comes with living inside a building which I alone constructed.
Plus, I love the adventure of camping high up in the Rockies during the winter. Apparently, I have this somewhat pernicious penchant for testing myself physically and mentally. Why else, would I walk most of the way from Illinois to Colorado?
Native Americans built their homes without need of architects, carpenters, contractors and building codes...all with their own hands. If you were a man you built a home for your wife and children. Today, we moderns specialize so much that we are only experts in our own narrow fields of endeavor all the while ignorant of the universe of other trades, fields and endeavors. So, to have a home today we need to engage these specialists.
And, as far as I am aware natives didn't rent their homes. They built them with their own ingenuity and hands.
The natives were a simple people in the sense that they were wise enough to not unnecessarily complicate their lives. Their homes be they the wigwams of the Algonquin tribes or the teepees of the Plains tribes were simple structures. Simple, but warm, inviting, yet intricate too...in their own way.
Natives had no need of prisons, jails, psychiatrists, taxes, mental institutions, schools and the like. Why not? Because they weren't neurotic like we are. Why? Because they felt connected to each other, to nature and to God. They lived simple unpretentious lives more concerned with the well being of their tribe than their own personal egos.
But, getting back to homes; modern homes today have every convenience. Yet, because of their complicated design and function they break down and then we have to call a repairman or a contractor to fix the problem. And, do we need these conveniences and creature comforts? Do we need the problems that inevitably follows having these so called niceties?
It's too bad we and I'm referring to we of the Western culture...it's a shame we are not as concerned with the state of our spirituality and that of our culture as we are of the comforts and the wants driven by our physicality.
I believe that we are so tightly wound up and neurotic that we must regulate things to the extreme, making everyday life so complicated that life becomes a burden that must be endured rather than enjoyed.
At the end of the day we feel more like a pack animal than a human being. We act and believe that life is now nothing more than a drudgery than a magical gift from God.
Most of us wake up in the morning wishing we could stay in bed and at least temporarily get off the treadmill.
And, we are a fearful people. And, this is why we need to overly control things and people. And, the more we attempt to exert control the more we realize we cannot control or manage our universe. Realizing that...we delve into denial and escapism via drugs, alcohol and unfulfilling relationships which only drives us even further into unreality.
But, as I came to realize almost 2 years ago when I left Illinois and hit the road that the chains that fetter us are many times of our own making. At any time we can release our burdens. Instead, many if not most of us strive relentlessly to climb the ladder at work so we can build or buy bigger and more luxuriant homes. Homes we rarely see except late at night when we come home frustrated and exhausted from work and finally drop into bed wondering what the hell happened to us today.
When is enough enough?
Most of us seem to be only concerned with getting THROUGH life instead of actually living life, learning, loving and being grateful for the gift and the mystery that is this thing which we call life.
Anyway, enough of my pontificating. While I'm constructing my woodsy winter shelter I'm sleeping in a tarp tipi of my own making. I'm situated about 400 yards away from the cabin. I have 2 sleeping bags and several blankets to keep from freezing, but just barely. The interior of my tipi has yet to reach 30 degrees at night.
I usually go in for the night around 8-9pm. But, before, I do, I sit in front of the hot embers of what was my supper fire just contemplating things. Then I stoke up the dying fire for warmth.
Looking at the stars, and the way the Milky Way spreads out across the iron-dark sky I sit there in the cold, damp winter night with the red and yellow spires leaping up from my now feisty campfire.
I find myself gazing with now sleepy, droopy eyes at the whitened snow capped summit of Mt Evans, 30 miles yonder and southwest where it scrapes the black skies and wonder aloud much like I envision the boy King who wrote,
"When I consider your heavens, the work of your hands, the moon, and the stars which you have ordained, what is man that you are mindful of him...?"
Alone, I sit there with nothing to console or babysit me, no TV, radio, phone, people...nothing...in scary solitude capable of nothing else but to speak words of gratitude to the unseen God hiding out there somewhere maybe just beyond Orion's Belt.
Thank you God, I find myself talking out loud, thank you for my life, for just being and for the unbelievable ability to relate to and with the Almighty Creator and cosmic artist who designed and built this magical dimension.
Because of my new nomadic way of life I have been able to simplify things and to detach from materiality and even from people. To live without expectation wanting little and loving much I'm living a life of renewal and conversion, but not in conformity to a westernized version of Christianity, but, rather to true religion, to the "Way", the way of self denial and subordination of the ego which Christ not so subtly suggested to Nicodemus one cold night when Nicodemus went to visit the Messiah seeking intellectual conversation and instead was told that he must be born again in order to see the Kingdom of God.
I am slowly and rather indelicately rewriting my past life of regrets trying to conform to the moral ethos of the Sermon On The Mount. For now, living as simply as I can and as a true human being and without the chains of the past or the expectations of the future, I believe I'm living now as God designed me. I am now enjoying life more and living it with gusto and joy.
Grace and peace to my friends!
BR Schoenbein
December 6, 2015- Sunday
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