Celebrating 1 Year of Peaceful Survival TPS-0017

This week I'm celebrating my one year anniversary of a solo path of austerity in the in the desert biome, I'm fully content for this location to be what consumes the rest of my life energy.

I'm also open to the possibility that this maybe a node in a network, and that I will have the blessing to replicate and build upon my lessons from this location and all of the other experiences I've had throughout my life.

To just continue to reiterate and to evolve the strategies and cycles of learning the land, adapting to it and harmonizing with it.

Permaculture is really about a sort of first aid response to damaged or marginal environments and as much as it is about working smart, not hard. 99 hours of design to 1 hour of work, as opposed to 1 hour of design, and 99 hours of work.

Taoistic elements of taking your time with things, are also embedded within the spirit and the training of permaculture design.

There's a sense of urgency that we need to accelerate these natural processes. That's what composting is. There are few, if any totally natural, that is, non human intervened process that is as efficient and as rapid as a thermophilic composting heap.

Understanding the natural processes and then sustainably scaling them in ways that create synergies as opposed to depleting an ecosystem.

You're supporting and making it more diverse, making it more rich and accelerating that process. Building topsoil can take talking hundreds, if not thousands of years, for these natural processes to take place.

But if you engage and interact and behave appropriately with human ecology, then the byproduct is that soil is built and it's built a lot faster.

So part of me says, I need ten years or 20 years to have the stuff I'm doing today on this one project site literally come to fruition and for me to even begin to understand the most cursory inter-relationships, of cycles of different interactions of species and whatnot.

There's so much to learn, it's ongoing.

There are many perfect worlds. One perfect world is, I never leave here again and I devote myself, like in The Man Who Planted Trees, he was committed to a whole bio region watershed with his efforts in that story.

It's a great animated piece, it's always apropos, it's so important, that's really the direction I wanna go with my life is, a lot of solitude, no human drama, a lot of being close to nature and wellness. Deriving the spiritual sustenance from that service to ecology and to future generations who are gonna be benefited.

In one perfect world, I stay here till the end of my life and just ever deepen the romance with this location.

To be honest, I feel I could be beyond fulfilled by that, in some ways that's the best I could hope for.

So I will just leave it up to the mystery of the universe, whether or not I'm destined to have the means or the calling to apply myself anywhere else, as a permaculture mercenary, or if I were to actually be able to relocate and do this in other places.

I very much do like the idea that without being a cult or without being a sort of spiritual organization...within the spirit of the decentralized punk rock movement having that fierce egalitarianism that comes from living the pit, living the mosh pit.

You just wanna share with everybody. You just want everybody to have a good time, no egos, no drama, everybody's welcome, everybody's accepted. You gotta really mess up to get banished.

There's a lot of forgiveness for people being wasted too.

I'm not interested in that anymore, so that's not part of my program.

I have a very austere home brew wine, honey wine twice a week regimen, just two glasses of my own honey wine, twice a week.

That's it. I do really like this christian fellow who was a military christian guy who said, you know christians shouldn't get drunk, just drink a little bit.

I would extrapolate that and just say, a Jedi doesn't get drunk.

If a Jedi had to play drunk to get along in a scenario where that was happening, and you had to play along with it, then you figure out a way to sneak water down the drinks, or swap them out with water.

Do whatever you gotta do. But I never liked being drunk. I never like being hung over, I never liked being nauseous. I don't like the spins. It's happened enough times for me to learn my lesson.

That's one thing that I am definitely leaving behind. I'm not gonna allow into my the areas that I'm responsible for. I do not feel comfortable with alcohol intoxication beyond a very limited level and that's different for everybody but with that said, I will be celebrating in my own way, this one year anniversary.

Just decompressing and sharing my thoughts in general on this. What it means to evolve out of the city, evolve out of various scenes and just be in a state where it's psychologically and hormonally possible to do a very deep, sort of permaculture version of man versus wild.

I love practicing the crafts that I have professionally developed over many years then applying them on my behalf with the sort of suspense and the thrill that the stakes are high in terms of not having support staff.

Not having a nearby medical center and being literally off road to where the stakes are high in extremely austere extreme wilderness desert conditions. Lots of things can kill you, not a lot of things can rescue you.

I have survived a year in this location. It's next level for me, because I had done a year of very much solo and very austere in terms of avoiding social contact during the first year of the pandemic and extending that even more so in this last year.

But the first year I was at a location where there were some people around, it was certainly closer to the road. The climate was far more forgiving. There was grid power, was water piped in. It was in San Diego County and being closer to the ocean, the fog was almost ever present.

There were some extreme winds, but mainly it was the threat of fire.

I feel far less of that threat where I'm at now, it's not zero, but it's far less. Far more austere. So whatever merit badges I earned from that much less dangerous, much lower stakes, original year one, all by myself and in much more extreme and and remote conditions….

So I'm celebrating the hard won lessons of this last year.

I make a lot of effort to promote rewilding as this as a spiritual practice that is complimentary to all other books and all other traditions and lifestyles.

To some people it's impressive. They ask, so how did you get by with food, water, shade, cold, heat...

All of those adaptive strategies were hard won.

My destiny is that I'm to be post-social, post-civilized.

In my earlier life, I collected a lot of valuable experiences. I have many things I'm grateful for looking back on.

There are very few people on this planet that I know that I would even invite to where I'm at.

For the operational security of my being where I'm at doing what I'm doing, which is not in and of itself highly sensitive other than that, I'm just keeping a very low profile.

More people can men more problems, there can be a scene, it can lead to a scene.

People can surprise you with unpredictable behavior that's erratic along with predictably erratic behavior.

What's sensitive about what I'm doing, where I'm at now is that it's on a level I've never experienced before in my life, where the mission is silence and darkness. Don't be making a scene. Don't be commingling with the locals. Just keep my existence as quiet as possible.

This is my bug out location my survival retreat, so for me, this is the textbook survivalist version bugging out.

Adventure with high stakes, that's part of what I celebrate having done this now, since the beginning of the pandemic was when I really at the beginning of my bugging out back to rural land, back to nature, living on the edge of wilderness.

That was year one, now it's year two and I am in the middle of wilderness.

Everything that I drilled and trained and studied for has been life or death.

I spent over a decade of being a very nerdy prepper, never have enough, you always wish you had more.

The grass is always greener and whatnot, in terms of the vehicle you can afford, etc. However the fundamentals of the training and the drilling apply to whatever preps you can afford.

I did hardcore s**t hit the fan bug out survival drills back in 2009. We did complete drill evacuation procedures, following our own designer checklist and algorithm that we created, and basically packing everything up and shutting everything down. Doing a vehicular bug out evacuation into the wilderness. Some people just call that a camping trip but it's sort of like a camping trip plus, because you're accounting for contingencies and things going wrong.

When times were soft you drilled so that when times are hard, everything within reason was trained for it.

It's a treasure. It's invaluable. I can't explain the feeling when you live by the principle of redundancy, meaning two is one and one is none, you have something that fails, and you have a backup when it's life and death to have that backup, and you fall back on it and you use it because you need it.

That is one of the best feelings I've ever had in life.

I've had it many times on my prepper journey.

I've had it many times where I'm at now, where this psychology, this lifestyle, has kept me alive or kept me from being completely helpless, to where I'm flushed into a system where the common denominator is that you're totally helpless and powerless.

You're totally dependent on whatever is fed to you, whatever services are rendered to you by the state, which, if you are a liberty person, and certainly if you are anarchist minded at all, or eco anarchist, even above and beyond, you don't want that threshold of when you cry for help to be a very thin or very short threshold.

You want to be far away from the scenarios that it would take to be a helpless beggar of the system.

Hopefully I've buffered myself in many foreseeable and some unforeseeable ways to make that threshold as far off as possible.

That all does come down to those sciences, you can break it down on all these different lists. I'm not the ultimate survivor, wilderness guru. I'm not cut out for any of those TV shows.

I'm just living one day at a time. Sometimes say to myself, being a survivalist, sometimes it's enough just to survive.

There's a lot of workaholism for sure. Workaholism is perfect for preppers, cause you will never run out of stuff to do, and you'll always have more projects, and you'll always be improving and you'll always be fussing with your preps and trying to expand and scale up.

In a healthy sense, it's a lot of fun. It's a way to get very organized. If it's organized, you're a good prepper. That works well with my Virgo mind.

I like things to be organized. I have a very clean desktop.

In the course of this year, I've been able to really organize and square away the the ruins of what was on this property before I got it.

When I got here, it was starting to get too hot, it was dangerous and hot. I was not about to do a bunch of demolition work.

Demo had been done by the decades of ruinous weather, to just reduce this previous homestead property almost to dust.

There was broken glass everywhere, nails everywhere, surprisingly far away from where you would think that it would be limited to.

Boards torn to pieces all over the place. Splinters everywhere.

This is a handful or so of acres so there's a radius of where the wreckage of the previous homestead, I don't know when it was built, but there's old cans of things that have to been from the 1950s.

So I don't know too much about the history, but I do know that it seems like the, the wreckage, the ruins of this previous house…

I stripped out all of it when it was safe to do so. For the first six months I was I was afraid to touch any of it. It was too hot to do any work.

When I got here, it was within a very few number of short weeks, it became impossible to do anything during the day.

It felt like it got even hotter at night. There's science behind that.

But it just meant that I was camping in limited shade, sweating out everything I drank, sweating profusely day in and day out, all day and night, just trying to keep my flesh from rotting off in that constant sweating state that I had never been in before in my life.

Just having to lay still and not move for the majority of sunlight hours, being very cautious about doing anything even when the sun was down, because if I trip and fall or lose consciousness or get a scorpion or snake bite and end up incapacitated at all, or even slightly debilitated, I will be dead when the sun comes up.

And that was the case for many months until recently. Since it cooled a bit, I've been on a frenzy to clean up the wreckage.

I've taken inventory of re-usable materials, there are a few trash bags of the stuff that I can't make use of that will eventually have to go to a landfill.

I've kept all the broken glass, I have kept all of the wood that's reusable, all the hardware, all the nails, saved everything, and sorted it out.

I've used a lot of it already on various projects.

Now I'm in beast mode to build out that very humble, very simple and very elegant design.

The pandemic has harden me, it is sharpened every one of my survival skills.

I'm invigorated. I'm not just waiting for the government to give me a green light to go back to normal. I'm invigorated to a point where I realize, you were lucky to have the good times that you had, because the bubble bursting, the epidemiological bubble bursting is to realize the musical chairs game is up.

Tempting fate is an understatement. Who knows if this is going to continue to smolder and flare up, smolder and flare up.

I've learned a lot more about epidemiology over the last year than I ever thought I would. As a prepper you have a generalized training for everything, though the pandemic brought epidemiological threats into focus.

I've taken the time to do quite a bit more research, and I'm continually humbled by how obscene the modern world is with its hubris towards invisible threats to your life. Talk about rolling the dice and gambling, what a gamble.

What a gamble urbanization is, what a gamble international travel is.

If I were to make a list of the most important lessons I've learned from the pandemic, what are the most important lessons?

Seeing the rate at which a new variant can overtake a previous variant.

My attitude isn't, oh no, I gotta wear three masks again.

Or, oh no, I gotta get boosted again. Or, oh no. My lifestyle is hindered in some way again.

I will have no comment on vaccination at this point. I did receive two doses. And I will have no comment further on vaccinations.

The more contagious new variants were able to completely out compete and replace the old variants in a population, nation by nation, and then on a global scale.

This was a wake up call. I gotta get away from that old paradigm of it's okay to be stuffed in a place with no ventilation, where people are coughing and sneezing and there's no escape.

Before the pandemic you would have been probably arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist if you wore appropriate respiratory protective equipment.

That was the old paradigm.

What scares me the most, the most important lesson I have learned is that after and despite all of the heightened awareness soon enough unmitigated, unrestrained variants started to pop off.

All of our attempted measures to prevent another pandemic completely failed. There was no resistance to any contagion preventing it from causing a new if potentially or subjectively milder global pandemic within days.

That to me, is the biggest lesson.

I will play devil's advocate. I'm going to pretend for a moment that I believe that COVID was a hoax. It didn't even exist, the whole thing was faked. It doesn't even matter if it was a lab leak hypothesis or weaponized gain of function...

No, the whole thing was a hoax that I'm gonna pretend and play devil's advocate from that conspiracy theory and say that it wasn't real.

Let's say it was just a sugar pill. Let's say it was just some sort of nano glitter.

It was some nano glitter that you could test for. They can inject particles into you, then through some sort of sci fi camera, they can trace where the particles go in the bloodstream.

The idea that you can put an ostensibly inert substance into a system, let's say you wanna see how a pollutant might interact with and affect a body of water.

You could simulate it by using basically some kind of food coloring. Like when you put a drop of food coloring in a glass of water, and it reveals to you the fluid dynamics that were invisible to you before.

So taking that concept across many scales, the idea is like, okay, let's just pretend that everybody was faking it. It was a total hoax, and hey, it was all psychosomatic.

If someone just told you're sick, all of a sudden you curse yourself, and it's all psychosomatic.

Even if the whole thing was a hoax, the lesson would still be from a point of origin in one place in the world, for that little nano particle of placebo glitter dust…

There was a video where you could only see the paint, I think it was like a glitter paint that you could only see under black light.

It was one of the early videos in the pandemic to teach people why they should wash their hands. They put a little bit on a door knob. Then it was the funniest thing. The video showed the black light footage of a room, a party. I don't know if the people knew that they were doing a science experiment or not, but they were just carrying on like normal and a tiny couple of square inches of this inert, nontoxic, black light, glitter paint, they wouldn't see that they were spreading it around.

It ends up everywhere on people's faces, on their clothes, on counter tops, everything is just covered in all these streaks of this particle.

We can't keep our hands to ourselves. We can't keep our hands out our faces.

There is no way to slow it down.

There's no way us rowdy monkeys are gonna all of a sudden become the most austere of Zen monks and practice all of these extreme austerities.

Forget about it. So that's it.

What this shows whether you are a COVID denier, a COVID minimizer, no matter what, there is at least one lesson that I hope we can agree on.

I don't think this was the worst virus that ever plagued humanity. I don't think it was the best virus that ever plagued humanity, but it was the most successful, bio-geographically of any virus ever it seems, it and the variants of it.

Even if you were to be such a denier and such a minimizer that you say that it doesn't do any harm to anybody, you would at least acknowledge that it does exist and it does have a nature to be contagious and to spread by certain means.

The lesson is that, the conclusion is that, the plumbing, the substrate, the petri dish of the globe of human the substrate, of the global human population...

It may as well just be one petri dish, one continuous gel of infectable biomass.

There's a more divine way of saying we're all one, and a more epidemiological way of saying we're all one. That way is a much less charming and spiritual perspective.

Almost everybody on the planet, sadly, is at the mercy of this amalgamation of infectable biomass and there are no drugs and there are no vaccines, and there are very few people who are disciplined enough to create any significant barrier to entry for a nimble pathogen to exponentially spread across the entire planet.

I'm beyond wanting to lecture. I'm beyond wanting to preach a people on how they should behave.

We're sitting ducks for a more virulent pathogen.

We'll be praying for a quick death, though some of them will mess you up and you'll most likely recover. Some of them will kill you very fast, some will kill you very slow.

A lot of diseases that exist in the wild, we don't even know of yet.

The more I zoom out, the more I realize, we've really been gambling, and we're taunting the evolution of infectious diseases.

If this wake up call really hasn't caused enough of a behavioral shift to slow it down, and we continue to see that a new variant can sweep the globe as fast as these ones have...And people's attitude is still not humble, it's not grateful.

In general, the attitude is just normalcy bias.

That's the thing that peppers have been always warning against.

It's the zombie apocalypse already, because the zombies just wanna live in their normalcy bias world, which makes them a threat to your preps.

That's the sort of dystopian narrative, the zombie apocalypse narrative, if one protein mutation is the jackpot for a given virus to where it can do far more damage than than this sort of practice run...

I say that, of course, with all due respect to those who have been the most damaged by it. I am not a minimizer. I'm not a covid denier.

I treat it like the big one, and if it's not the Big one, it's teaching us that the Big One is a more terrifying threat than than we ever imagined.

I would have thought that if the big one hits, FEMA is gonna come out and martial law is gonna happen. We will see a very mechanized, organized, global, top down, war on the pandemic to where you're gonna hope that you have food and water and medicine.



They'll do whatever it takes, by any means necessary, militarily, by force, to prevent the worst possible outcomes.

They're gonna institute all these measures, they're gonna come for everybody's guns round everybody up, put you on trains to camps. Maybe that's still the plan, but if they're also dropping like flies because they'll be wearing their masks on their chins...

They won't be doing their best to air gap transmission...

Not to be on a soap box about it, but I will definitely say I'm never going back to the old normal.

I've learned too much, and my life is more precious to me now than it ever has been.

I'm not ready to gamble it for any experience that's to be had in civilization.

I'm just practicing what I've preached since I was in my teens.

Now my prophecy is full circle in that, be careful what you wish for sense.

You wanna live in the Mad Max wasteland, and you love nature that much, you better really love nature if you want to live in the Mad Max Wasteland.

I guess I manifested what I have, and it is not for everybody.

I hope that whatever dream you wanna be living you're either living in it now or getting closer to living it and that your dream is not jeopardized by the behavior of other people who don't really respect your life very much.

To me, that's just part and parcel with being in the city.

You're just gambling, rolling the dice every day.

I rolled the dice every day for a year out here and I will continue to roll the dice.

What's my counter party risk out here in the gambling I'm doing here?

If I will be ant and coyote food and if that's how I meet my maker, I'm totally fine with that.

If my fate is to collapse out here and be ant food and squirrel food, I'm stoked about that.

In the meantime, I made it through all the seasons.

I had everything I needed to do it, for the most part. There were a few real close calls for feeling like I may not make it another day.

Whether the climate gets milder, whether the temperatures get higher or lower, whether the biblical plagues occur, hailstorms and floods...

I survived a one year cycle of the seasons in one place. It could be better or worse.

Most importantly I have experience and I can plan accordingly and not overestimate or underestimate grossly.

I've documented all of the projects along the way.

I am grateful that I made it a year against a lot of odds.

I feel more and more welcomed by the spirits of the land and the wildlife, which I am becoming ever more charmed by.

The relationships are starting to build the real depth and intimacy of being a good neighbor to the wild, being a contributor to the wellness of the ecosystem.

That feeling of satisfaction when you know that wildlife acknowledges you and what you're doing and that there benefiting from you.

That is a sweet life affirming experience that never gets old.

It is the ultimate fuel to survive, to continue.

And have the strength to disengage.

I'm not just living in my head like I was when I was spouting the rhetoric. This is all the real deal. Permaculture on the edge of the wilderness, in the middle of the wilderness, rewilding, not just on the weekends.

This is feral. This a path of towards post-civilization. The remaining tentacles of civilization are being reduced. I'm not a hundred percent self sufficient yet. There will still be trips back to civilization one twice a year.

That's about all I want. There are a few things to miss, but if I can cut the umbilical cord someday...that's rewilded in my book.

So far it has been one year, I'm manned up, I stuck it out and I pulled it off, I survived the year.

If I die out here anytime after the year, I will be infinitely less bummed out, having the pride that I made it at least one full year.

So here's too many more years to come. And let's pray for peace.

Pray that the wisdom of the preparedness lifestyle can be gently extended to buffer the worst extremes of deprivation that come in wartime.

I hope we are air dropping bug out bags and air dropping med kits and air dropping, survival manuals and everything else that goes along with them.

Meeting your basic survival needs so that you can limit how traumatic life can be.

I would just pray that we one day live in a world where, if there's gonna be millions of refugees flowing, that every single one of them has got their bug out bag, and that was just part of their lifestyle, and they weren't scrambling to find scraps when all the shelves are bare.

We're living in an insane, hideously dangerous world of warlords that can turn your life upside down, no matter who you are, where you are.

What are you gonna do if you have to leave in 5 minutes and never come back?

What's the plan if you have to stay for five months and not leave?

Bugging in and bugging out all these things that are just drilled into that lifestyle?

It hurts so much to think about how many people have not installed this preparedness lifestyle software and hardware in into their lives.

It doesn't mean being paranoid. It doesn't mean being afraid all the time.

The more prepared you are for any disaster, the less fearful you become because you feel like you have control of your destiny and you feel empowered.

It's an inverse relationship of preparedness and fear.

To be aware of the threats to normalcy in your life, it is healthy to be adequately prepared within reason and within your means to address that.

I would love to see a culture of preparedness, ever more resilient against shocks to the system of their survival.

Whatever they may be, man made or natural disasters.

In the name of the people suffering in this war, the least you can do for them not to suffer and die in vain, is to prepare yourself to not be as helpless as many of them have have become, as they've been displaced from their normal lives.

Whatever they are thinking they wish they would have done, let's do that for them, for ourselves and our own lives.

Financial preparedness, packing the bug out bag, learning medical first responder skills, having the gear and tactical training and communications and redundancy, all these things.

I will be redoubling my efforts to be more resilient and prepared for the horrors of war.