My entire life, I felt out of step amongst the normal toils of society. Growing up, I wrote about nature, humanity, and society, and I questioned the functioning of the world. By 17 I was writing transcendentalist poetry without ever having read any, having any clue what transcendentalism is, or even reading any poetry. I knew nothing about what transcendentalism was, I just had an "innate knowing" - as I now know Emerson refers to it - that stones could talk to us; that nature was alive, that it breathed, that it was divine and that same divinity lived within us.
There was something within me which spoke. All I could do was listen. I believe in old souls, and I am sure that I carry a spirit from the 1800s. Continuously, I have always sat down to write. I have been writing poetry and essays since I was 6! It is not something I try to do, or aspire to do - it is something that wakes me up at night and comes out in full. I can't stop it, and I don't control it. "Never forget that God isn't finished with me yet. I feel His hand on my brain. When I write rhymes I go blind and let the Lord do his thang" (2Pac, Ghetto Ghospel)
When I sit down to write, what comes out is far older and far wiser than what you would generally attribute to a person my age. I describe things I have never heard of, and use words in perfect context that I don't know the meaning of, until I later look them up. The words are always out of use, old words, and antiquated definitions I had never heard of or read. Somehow, they comprise most aspects of my writing continuously. Most are from the 17th - 18th century or early 1800s. Occasionally I have come out with some words and word usage, which is from the 1500s! For that is the key thing - it is word usage that I come out with from very old time periods - not just words.
I disagreed, from young, entirely with the world's revolutions (read, spins), and found myself unable to conform with life the way it is dictated. I read Thoreau when I was only about 15 or 16, and I identified so strongly with what he said - word for word, for all of it was exactly how I already felt and thought. I tried very hard, most of my life, to ignore these sentiments and take part in life the way society says you are supposed to. But my heroes - my role models - are Buddhist monks, Christopher McCandless, and Henry David Thoreau. I can not ignore what my heart and my soul calls for: peace, nature, truth, spirituality, wildness.
Try as I may, there is no place for me within society where I can take part in, free of compromise. I compromise my soul, my truth, my heart, and my ideals whenever I bend towards conformity and the validation that others want for me. By age 17 I wrote pages and pages of life within a small cabin in the woods - but I had yet to read Walden - I had only read Civil Disobedience and some of Walking, and most of a Plea for Captain John Brown. None of which encourage life amongst the wilderness.
My other books were Austen, Kafka, and Orwell, for the most part - so the inspiration truly came from a powerful desire within, to go and live this way.
To this day, nothing makes me happier. I currently live in a converted barn house and it is my idea of a perfect life. Only wilderness, nature, and freedom. There is no price you could pay me, because how I feel, and what I believe in, does not come from an idea, a person, a thought, or an inspiration. It comes from an unchangeable expression of me; it is me, wholly and unchangeably me. It always has been and always will be. That is why, when I first read Thoreau's Walden, when I first read about Christopher McCandless, the immediate connection and absorption I had to these realities was profound and desperate at the same time. I wanted more than anything to do what they did, to live like they did. Suddenly, I felt like I had an answer to what I most wanted - not because I didn't know it - but because I suddenly saw that it was possible to do it. For society, you see, tells you that you can't.
I wrote a huge novel, which I have never finished because I am unsure which way to take it, but the middle section - which was written before reading Walden, or reading about McCandless - was about me living in a farm, in the middle of nowhere, in the mountains, making my living by working alongside a farmer. I wanted more than anything to have a simple life in the mountains, where I grew my own food, worked with crops, and lived "on site"; it wasn't the craving for simplicity, it is the craving for freedom, self-sufficiency, control of my environment, and freedom of choices. My craving for simplicity, indeed, does arise from the belief in the natural and straightforward aspect of life. I believe wholeheartedly, and you will not change my mind, that most humans have no idea how to truly live, and they take part in over-complicated experiences and lives.
Tribal humans who live "wildly", foraging, hunting, and successfully surviving, are to me, far more superior than any man in any office, and any invention of man ever created.
I simply do not believe in advancements because modern advancements have not brought us an advancement of the spiritual, an advancement of our personal lives; an enrichment of our quality of life. Man's modern inventions have served only to wither away at the family unit, destroy philosophy, deteriorate spirituality, obliterate humanity and nature, and obfuscate those truly innate capacities present in every human to make their own way in life free from the confines of the dogmatic, erratic, and erroneous "system".
"That government is best which governs least" - and indeed, that government is best which does not exist and does not hold office in my life - for I believe in complete freedom of man, to do as he please and to live as he may; the tribes and the "savages" as Thoreau would refer to them, are the truly advanced ones, who succeed in living life as it is meant to be lived. Only with a certain (read, sure) understanding of transcendentalism can you then try to understand who I am, what I value, how I think, and what I want. My life is in the hands of nature, for we belong amongst it and exist only within it.
"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal."
