My massage therapist tells me that he wants to move. Where to? I ask. The Pacific Northwest, he replies. What about Fukushima radiation? I ask. “Ommigod!” he replies, not having paid attention to that. “Well, maybe the Southwest,” he counters. That’s going to dry up, I say.

But you know, there’s nowhere that’s “safe,” from environmental or other “threats.” All we can do is stake our lives in some local (no doubt polluted, in one way or another) place, and, as poet Gary Snyder said in a 1980s lecture in Jackson, Wyoming, where I had, temporarily, landed in my gypsy quest, “dig in.”

All places are worth saving. And we’re the ones who are on the ground now. What are we waiting for?

Well, way too many of us are zoned out. Permanently? “Health Ranger” Mike Adams thinks so:

Society’s insanity plea: the real cause behind global mass poisoning and the downfall of modern civilization

I’m not so sure. In fact, I think the rapid advance of especially young people excited about learning and practicing permaculture across the planet just might restore both Earth’s abundance and our own souls’ embodied life.

Meanwhile, here’s a very informative meditation from an author one week into the same three week raft trip down the Colorado that I took —

To Be One with the River

— back in 1990. I can safely say that it changed my life, brought me in touch with my incorporated self like no other three weeks ever. Just reading this article might change yours. Here’s the situation. These are the stakes. We have a lot of work to do. And we are the ones who chose, on a soul level, to be the ones alive to do it.

Field Notes from A Drying West