Some may call it a self-imposed exile, but several years ago we separated ourselves from so-called “society”. It’s a 90-minute ride to even get to a town from here, mostly across dirt ranch road, some of it “primitive” (white knuckles). About a year ago, our Ford Bronco died, and we got swindled out of $3000 for a replacement truck that . . . well, long story, but suffice to say we haven’t had a vehicle since then. We haven’t left the ranch in about a year. The handful of times we had visitors since then, they have been so kind as to bring us up some small amount of groceries for a “treat” or two, but we gained something very special in that time – perspective.

It’s not like we’ve always lived so remotely and we don’t know what the other side of the world is like. Many of the past 25 years we lived in suburbia, raising our kids and working our successful business. We traversed the country more times than I can count as we drove to the seminars we taught, kids in tow, giving them a better education than they could have gotten in a classroom. We stayed in major cities when we, too, were involved in the never-ending rat race. We went to restaurants too crowded to enjoy a meal, we took the kids to the requisite amusement parks, we stayed in hotels that didn’t realize their business was hospitality. But our vision was always to walk away from that life, towards one more connected to the nature part of human nature. To live a more natural life, abiding by natural law – which is the only absolute law under which humanity lives, anyway, whether we know it or not. As our culture fights natural law, believing that it can overcome the natural consequences of our actions, we simply screw things up for ourselves.