It's celebrated in dozens of popular songs -- Endless Summer, Wonderful Summer, The Boys of Summer:
A little voice inside my head said, "Don't
look back. You can never look back."
I thought I knew what love was,
What did I know?
Those days are gone forever
I should just let them go but-
I can see you-
Your brown skin shinin' in the sun
You got that top pulled down and that radio on baby
And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
after the boys of summer have gone
For
many of us, summer vacation stirs up fond memories -- nothing
scheduled, nothing that has to be done. "Oh, that magic feeling,
nowhere to go". Sleep in, eat slow, laze in the sun or shade, make
love, do whatever you feel like doing in the moment. Neil Young, Goin'
Back:
In a foreign land, there were creatures at play
Running hand in hand, needing nowhere to stay
Driven to the mountains high
They were sunken in the cities deep
Livin' in my sleep.
I feel like goin' back, back where there's nowhere to stay
When fire fills the sky I'll still remember that day
These rocks I'm climbin' down have already left the ground
Careening through space.
I used to build these buildings, I used to walk next to you
Their shadows tore us apart and now we do what we do
Driven to the mountains high, sunken in the cities deep
Livin' in our sleep.
I feel like goin' back, back where there's nowhere to stay.
And
then, as we get older, or the summer fades, dread sets in -- we have to
return to 'civilized life'. We try to grab brief pieces of this "magic
feeling" all our lives -- weekends, two-week vacations, but they're
almost over before they've begun. Not like those endless summers of our
childhood.
We are taught to believe that the behaviours and
experiences of long summer vacations are lazy, irresponsible, decadent,
self-indulgent. But I would suggest the reason we love them so much is
that they are the way we were meant to live. The way we lived before
agriculture and civilization. The way the other creatures we share this
planet with have always lived. and still do, except for those we
imprison on our farms and in our laboratories or drive out of their
natural habitats.
It's the way we will perhaps one day live
again, after civilization falls, and our lives of artificial scarcity,
overextended systems, overconsumption and overpopulation have ended.
'Idle' summer vacations are about as close to a natural life as most of us will ever experience.
But
for so many, by the time we are ready to retire, we have become so used
to our artificial lives, so indoctrinated in the way we have come to
live, that the idea of being able to live, at last, a natural life,
fills us with foreboding, fear, and doubts about our worth in a society
that equates worth with wealth and value with 'earned' income.
And more and more of us will never
be able to afford to retire, so we will be like the modern Russians,
whose life expectancy has fallen years behind normal retirement age. We'll never know what we missed.
Is it too late? Between our overextended economy, the propaganda of civilization, and our fading memories, could most of us ever rediscover the sheer joy of a natural life, and, more than that, insist
on it as our birthright as free citizens of Earth? Perhaps the new
hunter-gatherers of civilization, the nearly 1.5 billion humans living
in squatter communities in struggling nations, can offer us some clues.
Those who know these people say that, despite their poverty, lack of
access to healthcare, education and other 'essential' services, they
are happy, and reluctant to leave their makeshift communities, even
when they have the opportunity to do so. "No one is controlling what
you do here."
My April Fools' post suggested the world would be
much better if we all made love instead of working, and it was, of
course, mocking the truth, even that of possibility. But could we, just
like those of so many civilizations (like the Anasazi) before us, just walk away
from our culture of hierarchy and scarcity, just stop putting up with
it, not out of necessity like the squatters od struggling nations, but
out of choice? Is it really irresponsible to refuse to work and consume and live in debt in a culture that is destroying our world?
We do what we must, then we do what's easy, and then we do what's fun. The natural life of our endless summer vacations was certainly easy and fun. When will we reach the point where we no longer must
turn our backs on natural life in favour of a culture that makes us
everybody else? How much say do we have over our own lives? If our
lives are movies we script ourselves, who is producing and directing
them?
Maybe the first step isn't
natural enterprise or intentional community, a walk on the Edge. Maybe
the Anasazi had it right. Maybe the first step is to just walk away,
and everything else will follow. But how do we walk away when there are
no longer any frontiers to walk away to?
Perhaps the answer is to walk away to right where we are.
All we need is love, food, and, in harsher climates, collective warmth
and shelter. How much can that cost? In an affluent nation, I calculate it
at $14,000 per family, which, for an extended community sharing space
and facilities would work out to about $3,000 per person. To be free,
happy, and totally in charge of your own life. We could earn this by
cashing in what we already have and don't need, or by working maybe an
hour a day or a day a week in a sustainable community enterprise.
We could, most of us, do this tomorrow. Endless summer, for the rest of our lives. Remember that feeling? What's holding us back? What's keeping us from just walking away? What will it take to set us free?
(photo off the Internet by Chris Chin)
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
