The woods beckon but it has been cold. I’m reluctant to put on shoes, the cat is not eager to see me go. He knows his meals will be delayed once I’m on the other side of the door.

I’ve been poking around at intentional communities again, even as I know I’ve aged out of the desired demographic of the communities that most appeal to me: income-sharing, labor-sharing. I invite friends for dinner and we all still talk of it, dream of it, but we are all aging out. We will have to find another way to walk away. It was Daniel Quinn, in Beyond Civilization, who wrote that you don’t need to move someplace different to get beyond civilization, you just need to make your living in a different way.

And aye, there’s the rub, for we are all tired of making our living. Of sitting at desks, tapping on keyboards, of looking at last month’s p&ls and saying, “There’s no way we can keep this going.”

The rich live on leverage. The rest of us pay cash. Except no one wants our cash these days, they want the intermediated data stream of ones and zeros, where profit is extracted with every transaction, and we are all, yet again, both consumer and consumed.

I try on my old wool coat, the one I’ve been wearing for ten winters or more. The lining is torn and there is a hole in the pocket through which my lip balm regularly escapes; I know I will find it at season’s end, hiding somewhere in the hem. The coat feels constricting, too many layers underneath, or maybe I’ve just gotten fat. It’s not a hiking sort of coat, but my woods is not a hiking sort of woods. It is a strolling woods, a flat expanse along the river’s edge, bisected by the levee, the access road. You never escape the drone of civilization in this woods, the murmur of traffic on the highway, the trucks hauling gravel from the crushed stone company at the bend in the river. Still, there is leaf mulch underfoot, and the occasional call of a hawk overhead.

I sense a hollowness in this year’s wintering, when no snow has yet fallen and the hours pass undifferentiated. I tap at the core of these days and hear an echo of winters past, but when I reach inside there is nothing there.

And perhaps the lesson is: don’t reach.

Just walk. There is ground beneath your feet even as your fingers find the hole in your pocket, worrying it with your probing and making it worse.

I read that we are falling into superstition, giving in to magical thinking, that we were this close to ending history when it all went pear-shaped. Woe is us. I listen to podcasts in which the host exhorts us not to give in to despair, but at what point do you say, this is not despair, this is the sanity of adaptation: to walk in the woods that is not really a woods, because it is the only woods you have.

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_{^{(Photo Credit: A New & Accurate Map of the World ca 1651, NYPL)}}