A List

It started with Into The Wild (the movie with Emile Hirsch) and my brother Tim. The urge to be in nature. To find wild animals that we've never seen before but have lived so close by. The movie was great, but I think Eddie Vedder's excellent soundtrack is really what got me to hold onto the idea. Tim puts it on as we approach the White Mountain National Forest, and it has been a prominent soundtrack for my activities for the past year. There is really no better music for driving, or, I imagine, for hiking, biking, or sitting still. The air should be moving, or you within it, though.

The Friday before last I went home and Tim and I watched a movie about Dick Proenneke (watch some of it here), a man who left civilization for the wilderness of Alaska, where he built a cabin by hand and lived in it for over thirty years. By no coincidence, I have also been listening to a free audiobook version of Walden by Henry David Thoreau (get it through the awesome Librivox project). Living off of your own efforts, directly. It has been a long time since I have found an idea that speaks to me so loudly. Perhaps not since I was courting Amy (if "courting" is even the right word), a time when I knew I had found something new and full of potential.

Just after Christmas, Amy and I stayed in a Yurt at Frost Mountain Yurts, and other than firewood and propane, we were left to our own devices for fueling our activities. I brought my guitar. Amy brought some knitting. Leela ran in the woods. Reading, knitting, hiking, singing. Even though it was just two nights, it was by far one of the best vacations of my life.

All of these things have been collecting and swelling in my mind, and they lead to important questions. What good is a subscription to cable TV? Why are there five guitars in the room with me? Why do we enter into legal borrowing situations like student loans and renting an apartment? I feel as though I am going to undergo some changes soon, and today I want to put together a list of luxuries I would like to take with me through it all. My hope is that within a year or so, I own very little more than what is on this list.

• a guitar
• good books that I feel a need to own (Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut, etc)
  
• adequate TV, with DVD player
• notebooks or other paper to write and draw on
• a good chair
• a good table
  
• mp3 player
  
• sturdy laptop computer
  
• bed
  
• kitchen supplies (this is a list unto itself, and I will pare it down another time)
• digital camera
• digital media that is organized and compact (ie, DVDs stored in large wallets and not displayed in the commercial cases)
  

I am not done. But I want to spend some of my work day at the library, so I will work more on this list later. Sorry.