This photographic essay of the author’s move off the grid in Los Angeles into the remote wilderness of a 1,600 acre valley in British Columbia is a page turner.
Visakha muses before moving there, “Perhaps those long winter nights and endless summer days would forge different people out of us: people closer to the earth, to simple faith, to contented, noncommercial, commodity-free lives. Perhaps observing Canadian loons and black bears while taking long walks in dense forests, working the soil with our hands, feeling glad about the things we grew and the miracles around us, we would begin to distinguish reality from illusion. ”
And then, “What actually happened was quite different. Black bears ate our carrot crop and broke our apple trees to get our apples. Aphids attacked our berry bushes and ravished our Russian kale. Mice used almost mystic powers to get into our sealed root cellar. A neighbor’s nineteen-year-old son broke into and robbed our house. In January it was minus 30 degrees F. In July it topped 100. The winters were dreary, the summers mosquito-filled, and the autumns dry. In 2003, a forest fire burned 25,000 forested acres just north of us. At one point, drenched in terror, we saw flames shooting over the eastern ridge less than a mile away.”
With a dry sense of humor and photographs, Visakha dips into the Bhagavad Gita and philosophical insights that inspire and appeal to our universal desire to transcend.