Sunlight Treasure

Finding our invincible summer

“This is HARD” I catch myself thinking with unsettling frequency during this cold and already long winter. The intensity of this hard mirrors the height of ecstasy of this place in summer, but inverted. It’s a dark, lonely, tired ache that revels life, even the one we’ve always dreamed of living, is never as simple as we imagine it.

We live in VT, a short two and an half hour drive away from our former home in Boston, but a world away in the day-to-day texture of life. We live in a modest timber frame home now, built by a neighbor, at the top of beautiful mountain. All we see for miles around are trees, and no utilities come into our house from the long gravel road that leads here. No power lines, no water pipes, no lines for gas (though the Amazon Prime guy still finds a way). Our mailbox is a 3 mile drive down the mountain.

We’re 100% off the grid here and there’s much to love and geek out about the systems that sustain us. We collect the fresh clear water we drink from a spring that magically pours out of the ground above our home. We harvest our electricity from the sun and store it away in batteries in the basement. We gather wood from our land and use it to heat our home. It is peak resilience. The kind I’ve yearned for and revered for years as a balm to the instability upending our planetary systems. AND YET. It can also be incredibly brittle in ways that we are reckoning with.

Let’s take heat. It’s on my mind a lot these bitterly cold days. The work of keeping our home warm day in and day out when it’s -1 degree outside doesn’t begin when I peel back the the warm seal of blankets and force myself outside to collect the day’s wood. It began with sharpening a chain saw blade seasons ago. It involves knowledge of the right tree to fell, of the right variety, age, and location to make it harvestable, as well as the right lean so that it won’t kill me when it falls. THEN the work commences. Fell the tree. Limb it. Buck it up to 18-inch lengths. Deliver the rounds to Dina (my partner) who splits them mostly by hand. Stack and cover. Do enough of this (seven cords-worth) with enough foresight and planning that they’ll dry in time for winter and we should make it through to spring. It’s an impressively physical process that yields that tired old chestnut “Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice”.

This is Simple Living at its simplest (read: not simple) and it is “sustainable”. We have enough trees on our property that we will never go cold (as long as our bodies are up for the harvest). But it’s all contingent at the end of the day - whether we’re depending on the strength of our own back in Vermont, or the outdated extractive systems that delivered our heat in Boston. I feel more in control when we’re doing it all ourselves. But self reliance relies entirely on able-bodied us. And lately there’s been many days when it feels like there just isn’t enough: time, energy, drive to keep it all going.

These are the days when the sun won’t shine for a week and it’s 12 am and our back-up generator won’t turn over. Days when our son is sick and our daughter gets a concussion and the twice-a-day 40-minute drive to school becomes four trips (off-grid in VT also means in-car, a lot). Days when the news of fire in LA and the winds of shambolic leadership from all sides become a conflagration of fear in my mind that I cannot contain. Days when we lose the fight to keep our loved ones safe from the weight of their own despair. On those days I yearn for the ease of some former life in the city, even though I know it’s an escape built on a memory I can’t get back to and an ease that our planet can no longer afford.

This season, it all feels a bit hard. And harder still for others without the privilege of these kind of worries. So we choose our hard. And for now, we are sticking with this Vermont hard. It is the one that is aligned with our deepest knowing and yearnings for wholeness. And the one where tender truths and insight are often revealed as a result of the dark and constancy of the work. “Winters here??” a seasoned Vermonter once explained. “They are strong medicine”.

Albert Camus wrote that “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer." And throughout this winter at 5 am, in the darkest, quietest and coldest part of the day, I rise in search of it. Every morning begins the same way - bring in the day’s wood waiting at the door, kneel before a cold stove on a cushion that would otherwise live in a church, strike my match and wait for the light to spread.

As the quiet and warmth seep into me I ease into the final stage of heating a home with fire - the sitting. I leave behind the necessity of the labor and give myself over to wonder that the heat on my skin is the same heat of an ancient sun stored by a tree. I’m struck that the long process of physical works is also a connection to something old and essential about being alive on this planet. And if I zoom way out, and look down on this whole life we’ve created, there is sacred sense of symmetry - that as fall shifts to winter and the earth’s orbit tips away from the sun, our family’s orbit draws in tight to the tiny sun at the center of our home. The one I’m tending now. Survival in these moments feels like a collaborative act of our labor and the generosity of the land we steward. Fractal of truth. A semblance of summer. As darkness begins to break and I rise for day, I carry the fire along and it warms me for a third time.

Subscribers can also access:

This post’s companion poem - Take Your Mind for a Walk