Getting out of the rat race is a matter of letting go. Pry your fingers off that cold steel bar, close your eyes, lean back, and fall. Instead of being dashed to bits on the jagged rocks below, you'll land in a warm feather bed, listening to a crackling woodstove fire while smelling soup simmering on the stove and bread just ready to come out of the oven. Think about prosperity instead of the race to accumulate wealth; healthfullnes instead of the anxiety of trying to secure health insurance; contentment with what you have instead of the drive to accumulate more--or to even keep up in today's sliding economy.
I don't have all the secrets; I'm still on the grid, I still own a car, and I can't realistically completely homestead on my half-acre small-Vermont-town residential lot. But I've got wood enough to get me through the winter, and my pantry shelves are groaning under the weight of all the food I've put up this summer--food that I scavenged and gathered, grew and harvested, supplemented with stuff bought from the local farmers market. I've still got kale and beets in the garden, and stir-fry greens growing in the cold frames. I've got sweaters and socks I've knit by hand, many of them of my own hand-spun yarn.
The downward economic turn will compel many people to turn to simple things out of necessity, and they'll be looking for the lost wisdom of how to can applesauce and cook on a woodstove. But in many quiet corners of the world and the U.S., even here in the fast-paced northeast, that wisdom never got lost. Winter comes every year, and even when the stock market isn't volatile and rumours of recession are not taking on that frightening edge, nothing beats the simple satisfaction of stocked-up pantry shelves.
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