Henry David Thoreau came to the woods because he “wished to live deliberately,” and I reckon that noble intention, with its marvelous thin-aired vagueness could be made to fit, with a little shoehorning, any new enterprise. Intentions aren’t only vital lodestones as we navigate towards our goals, but they are also probably unavoidable, and the intent when we begin a voyage (“I have come to Kroger’s because I wish to buy bagels and nonfat half & half!”– or perhaps, to adopt a more Thoreau-vian universality: “–because I wish to be nourished!”) also becomes the lens through which we parse our lived experience, both within and without the framework of ambition. I mean– Thoreau, for example: his life of austere isolation was largely a philosophical construct. He built his cabin on his best friend and mentor’s property, and Walden Pond itself was a popular place, not a wilderness, and was occupied year-round by swimmers, skaters and picnicking families. Thoreau’s “hermitage” was a twenty-minute walk from his family’s home–even closer to Emerson’s house–and he was a frequent presence at both homes, for meals and games and conversation. His mother and sister visited the cabin weekly, laden with undocumented groceries. But Thoreau’s _intention_ (“Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!”) controlled the narrative and so we read nothing in his book of peregrinations home for cookies, of the racket of Sunday boaters, of the Boston commuter line, bordering him to the SW, or of his personal guests, whose numbers sometimes cracked double digits.

So no, I’m not a Thoreau fan-girl– but the guy is living in my head rent-free these days, and if I seem to be awfully hard on one of our founding American saints, it’s because I’m feeling a few parallels, and not the flattering sort. I am creeping up on a significant anniversary: in six weeks, I’ll be marking five years on my own rural homestead. In the interest of transparency, and perhaps my one opportunity to claim moral superiority to a bona fide American Paragon (jk, people, jk!) it’s time to look backward, look around me hard, and then maybe, with something like humility and realism, set a more grounded path forward, into the next half-decade. I’m doing this as a setting down for my older self, who will indeed be very old, and for whomever may succeed me here, but I am also hoping that the community I dreamed of, which proved so elusive in the flesh, may manifest in the ether–with wisdom, or comfort, or perspective. If you are reading this, and if you’ve lived any part of it yourself– I’d love to know your thoughts and your dreams, too.

To that end, this look back at my greatest and, given my age, probably last project will be built in five stages, one for each year, like a very top- heavy space-race-era rocket:

1. This post, the first, is…kind of a mess. I knew I wanted to write something, but I wasn’t sure how to get into it, so I just jumped in and began to dog-paddle roughly in the direction of the sun…and here we are! An introduction, I guess: me writing myself into a corner, or into some understanding of the Task at Hand.

2. Part two, which I plan to post on Sunday, will detail my criteria as I looked for a Place, and my initial goals.—and this is going to be the toughest for me, because some of my goals now seem so ill-conceived, unrealistic, based on very little lived experience and therefore–albeit innocently–grandiose. And they changed so often! It’s embarrassing, but I just need to get through this stuff and set it down.

3. Part three will be a lot more entertaining, as I detail my worst failures, everything that went wrong, or that I musunderstood or mismanaged, and sometimes just Stuff That Happened– like a global pandemic, for example.

4. Here I will look at what actually–and sometimes serendipitously went right. Sometimes, what went right wasn’t what I was aiming for, but worked out okay, and I’ll take it.

5. The last section–which now seems like it won’t get writ until mid-April, will set stage for the next five years by charting a wiser course forward, and doesn’t _that_ sound grand…or grandiose? I’ll try to make it not grandiose. I’ll try to nail it down. A revised dream, with a stronger grounding.