A Notion of Relief

Feeding out before the storm. I like how the cows are watching the bale in anticipation.

If you plow driveways for a living, there are exactly two kinds of snow: Money snow, and the sludge that fell last night, which might best be described as “poverty snow.” That’s because most plow guys charge by the job, not the hour, and a storm that consists of four or five-inches of cold, low density powder, the sort of stuff that practically leaps from the path of the truck as if in anticipation of contact… well, that, my friends, is money snow. That’s the sort of snow you can plow with a hot coffee wedged into your crotch and a sugared doughnut on the dash, with the radio tuned to 107.1 FRANK FM, with your foot to the floor – 20 mph on the straights, the snow pillowing and billowing into the weeds, a $30 driveway done in 8 minutes flat. A bite of doughnut, a sip of coffee, Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion, and onto the next. You could plow forever.

But this stuff? This stuff is the reason you don’t take money snow for granted. This stuff is the reason you keep a shovel and a bag of sand in the bed of your truck. This stuff is the reason you think about charging by the minute, rather than the job.

This stuff is the reason our truck is current stranded in middle of our driveway with a pool of hydraulic fluid beneath the raise/lower cylinder of the plow. Ah, well. So it goes. At least I needn’t wonder what I’ll be doing later this morning.

•    •    •

Part II of my interview with Andrea.

BH: I would like to hear more about your family’s days, the first thing you do in the morning, the last thing you do before bed, etc

AH: Get up. Place fire in the stoves. Make coffee. We have slow mornings. We get to have slow mornings. We never had that before. Work: fetching water, doing the dishes, chopping wood, feeding the animals, then working on some building (right now a sauna) or a book (right now a book about the old norse poem called Voluspá). We used to have a lot of animals but we don’t anymore because it was a bit much work for us (we are still somehow- but not as much as we used to- in the process of BUILDING and creating, our homestead is not a fully functioning operation yet, still lots of things we need to learn and do). Food plays a large role in our lives and I spent a lot of time preparing the food, baking or making dinner. In the wintertimes we don’t do a lot, we go into hibernation, we drink hot cocoa, read books, we don’t lift a finger- in the summertime we work until very late in the evening, we work all of the time. Our lives changes all the time and I think this is very healthy- what made us sick before was the fact that there was not time or space to actually be tired or go into hibernation and there was not time or space to do the opposite, we had to live a life of constant productivity and our lives in the forest is not like that. The days are extremely varied. Depending on factors such as weather or mood.Work. Lunch. Work. Dinner. Internet. Books. Music. Last thing we do: fill the stoves with firewood. Sleep.

BH: If you could do it over again, what are three things you’d do differently? 

I think it’s a good thing we didn’t have a backup plan. We invested everything. We didn’t have any money. If we wanted to go back we could’t because we had nothing to come back to. I think this was essential because in the hardest of times I would have used the backup plan if we had one.
So I really would’t do anything differently. We needed everything that happened. I only wish I hadn’t been so fearful and afraid but I was and this was a part of it as was doubt.

BH: You write about despair pretty regularly. Can you talk about the role of despair in your life? 

AH: I believe that we, as modern people and me in specificality suffer from a notion of relief, a longing for a paradise state of eternal bliss free from disappear and hurt. Since moving into the wild this notion has changed a bit. I have had moments of joy and grace, so much joy and so much grace in nature that I will never be able to find the words to describe it. Absolute total bliss. More than bliss. More than joy. More than grace. I call those moments for “the happiness moments”. They have been so hard to describe, much harder than the disappear and also I have tried not to rub it in peoples faces too much- if I describe that joy and that grace people might want to do like we have done. They will be deceived by a notion of paradis. A tale of perfection. But the TRUTH about this tale and the TRUTH about the happiness moments are that they are equally balanced by moments of total and absolute dispair. And you have to take that despair. You have to go through it. You have to into it head first because you can’t escape it… and lately I’ve come to think that maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe we shouldn’t fear the ugly so much and maybe we shouldn’t fear depression so much and maybe we should’t fear despair so much. Maybe it’s totally interconnected with the grace and the joy? The more you seek to protect yourself from moments of hopelessness…. the less hope you will feel?

It’s something I’ve been thinking about.

And I’ve been thinking about it because our despair was good for us. It was GOOD that we were so frustrated and unhappy and had so much dispar because if we had´nt acknowledged that these were the emotions we were feeling… then we might not have REACTED.

The despair made us ACT.

So that´s what I think about that.


BH: Ok. I think that’s probably enough, don’t you?


AH: Never. I think what is most needed in our culture, more needed than anything, is that we begin to TALK to each other. Share experiences. Open up. I believe in open source- of the mind. Let’s share experiences and doubts, lets connect without the pretentious and without the taboos.
That’s it.