Basically, the reason I’m focusing so much on mythology and philosophy and the spiritual dynamics of living in our dying civilization right now is that I really have an aversion to living outdoors, being close to nature, gardening, tracking, awareness, etc. It’s a hard confession to make, but it’s the truth. Perhaps this won’t come as a revelation if you’ve read my blog closely enough.

Yet, what I want and dream of is to be at home in the middle of nature. I know theoretically that that would be the most in balance, it would bring me the most fulfillment, and also, if I were able to live in harmony with nature I would have the best chance of surviving the coming difficulties.

So how do I get from point A to point B? How do I get myself to move in a direction that will ultimately be good for me, without doing violence to myself? Answer: Start by reshaping my ways of thinking about it.

It’s an uphill battle though. From the beginning of my year in the woods, I knew that I wasn’t interested in primitive skills. I followed a romantic myth of the Wilderness Warrior into the woods, and it dissolved in the face of cold, hard reality. I learned a lot of valuable lessons in that year, but one of them was that even though I could live primitively, it was extremely hard on me physically. And I don’t want to do it again.

I loathe nature. I cannot bear the aches and pains of it.

Yes, I am a wimp. But I bear the battle scars and I think I have some justification. My health was not robust in the first place, and I gave it some hard blows with that hard living. Having uncontrollable diarrhea is not fun; having to run for several minutes to a spot sufficiently distant from camp, grab some sphagnum moss, dig a quick hole, and expose my butt and genitals to swarming mosquitoes while straining my aching leg muscles in a low squat every time I have to diarrhea is much worse. I suffered from hypoglycemia at various points — headaches, fatigue, digestive upsets, mood swings; it’s a precursor to diabetes — and no one could do anything about it, the local expertise being limited to sealing cuts with balsam fir pitch or experimental diet or fasting therapy. In the winter, sometimes my back would cramp up so bad from sleeping on the cold ground that I couldn’t sleep for the pain. My body was always aching from walking around with the typical civilized person’s egregiously poor posture, and from never having a comfortable place to sit the way I have been accustomed to sitting all my life: in chairs. As I’ve mentioned many times before, it was in some ways a trauma, an act of violence, to make my body endure such unending hardship in the service of my poorly conceived romantic myth.

All other things being equal, I prefer sitting indoors, in a cushy chair, in a climate-controlled environment, idly browsing the Internet on my widescreen laptop. I prefer traveling long distances by sitting in a comfortable car and pushing my foot down on a little pedal. I think fancy technological gadgets are really cool. I like reading books from all over the globe — I’ve learned a lot from reading books by people from every continent. I really enjoy watching exciting movies, without having to lift a finger to do anything but press the remote. I love eating exotic cuisine from around the world. I like the feeling of a well-stocked refrigerator. I prefer shitting into a toilet, in a clean, quiet room, while reading a nice book.

Yes, there are tons of problems with this lifestyle, and yes, life really is more fulfilling when stripped down to the basics. But I wouldn’t be honest with myself if I didn’t admit that these civilized comforts are strongly attractive to me. I guess you could say I’m addicted to the comforts of civilization.

Part of the ideal of true freedom or enlightenment means being happy wherever you are, whatever the conditions are. I guess an aim of living primitively is to realize that true fulfillment can be achieved, and indeed may be more readily available sometimes, when there is a material lack.

But just because you live primitively doesn’t mean you’re free. Addictions don’t just go away because you go live in the woods. I know that from personal experience. Bad habits, left unexamined, go into hiding, remaining repressed and untransformed, ready to reemerge when the opportunity arises. What separation from bad “civilized” habits and addictions I achieved, I achieved through forcefulness and willpower, and in that sense, the yearlong was a useful exercise in developing the will. But a strong will ungoverned by love or understanding is cold and cruel.

Moreover, willpower alone is ineffective in truly addressing the underlying pathologies. “Rewilding” requires more than just going back into the woods, or being very disciplined, in my opinion. It requires becoming aware of all of these bad habits and, one by one, dispelling them, transforming them into something positive, and healing oneself. This, the program and my community could not provide, nor guide my process. It takes time, it takes introspection and self-analysis, and it takes a safe, comfortable space into which one can retreat, to recuperate when necessary. Such things are not typical of wilderness survival schools, even Teaching Drum. This safe space I have readily found in civilization, and in my personal spiritual practice.

So here I sit, comfortable, civilized, remembering of course the many heart-filled good times with the people who were my second family at Teaching Drum, but also remembering, with heaviness, the physical consequences of being in nature. And I’m afraid. Because if the doomsayers are right, then things will collapse to a far worse degree than I experienced in the yearlong. After all, we had supermarket food brought out to us every few days. We had frequent drives into town to borrow books from the library, eat sugary foods, and check e-mail. We didn’t worry about where our next meal came from. Tanning hides was ultimately a luxury. Making traps was for fun and interest. We had civilization as a safety net to catch us in our stumbles from asceticism. If the world as we know it really does end, then there will be no such safety net, and the suffering may be far worse.

But if I did somehow find a way to live in balance with the natural world, then my suffering may be that much less. And, deep down, I still know that to be whole in oneself is synonymous with being whole with the world around oneself.

So, both from fear and from a wise ideal, harmony with nature is still one of my aims.

But currently, I still hate nature. My health can’t take it right now.

It has taken some independent self-examination to begin to be aware of the health issues that arose from the yearlong. (During the yearlong, I was so unaware of myself that I didn’t even know that my back ached all of the time. How I could have lived in such ignorance, I don’t know.) Now, after a year of massage school (lots of massage exchanges!) and a year, so far, of acupuncture school, I’m just beginning to understand and rebuild my health, and I look askance at returning to that “state of nature.”

But I’m trying to make a start of it.

I’ve worked on my health first, and I am having good success over this past year. It’s been too long that I’ve lived with a low standard of health and energy. Qigong, acupuncture, herbs, diet, nutritional supplements, energy healing, Alexander Technique, and personal work are all combining to make me feel generally healthier and more energized than I have in a long time.

Now I turn my attention back to my original goal in seeking out primitive skills, which was to learn how to be a spiritual person in a physical world. But it’s now invested with a more pressing, practical need to live in this world, not only because of my growing awareness of the coming collapse of industrial society, but also because I am at that developmental stage in my life: I’m recently married, a few years away from graduating with a useful trade. I’m preparing to have children and to set down roots. I’m beginning to build an adult role in society.

So now I begin to ask: How can I manifest my spiritual values in this dysfunctional civilization? What sort of life do I lead in it? What meaningful values, principles, or myths can guide me?

How do I return to a state of nature, without hating it?