Las Cañadas Ecovillage, Mexico

I recently came back from a trip to Las Cañadas Ecovillage in Mexico, where I spent a week working in the fields and forests of the village, washing my hands and my dishes with captured rainwater, using composting toilets, and eating food grown within a 10 minute walk of where I slept at night. My traveling companions were the other members of a work crew that had come to Las Cañadas to learn how this piece of land went from being a cloud forest to a cattle ranch, and how it is slowly becoming a cloud forest again.

During the days we worked in the fields with Don Adán, a toothless, sun-worn campesino with twinkling eyes and a ready laugh. I wondered how we must have appeared to him, this group of relatively affluent North Americans who traveled to southern Mexico to work with our hands and our bodies in the hot sun. What did Don Adán make of our eagerness to spread sheep manure compost over a field of corn and beans? We sang as we shoveled, and I thought about Don Adán and me, about the nature of work, and about what my college educations – both of them – have prepared me for in life.

My trip pulled into very sharp focus a question that has been on my mind in one form or another for the whole of this past year.

How shall I live?

It is a very simple question, so simple as to be totally overwhelming. I am in the thrilling and terrifying position of being able to approach this question with openness and sincerity, with a field of possible answers that is nearly limitless.

To give a sense of just how open my plans are: I just finished a master’s degree program. I have a summer job, which ends at the end of August. I have a lease which ends in October. I have no debt, no car, no significant other, no kids. I have a plan to take a trip to Missouri to visit my parents in September and to spend several weeks at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, and after that my calendar is completely and utterly blank. The only thing written on it after October 1 is Christmas.

That the question of how to live is so prominent in my life feels like the culmination of several years of building awareness. Along with many other people, I have recently become painfully aware of how dependent I am for my very existence on distant lands and distant people and of how poorly my values are expressed through the relationships that sustain me. As for many others, this journey started for me with an awareness of how far most of our food travels to get to us and of how ecologically and socially destructive conventional agricultural practices are in many parts of the world. Several years ago, I began to make an effort to buy more of my food from local growers who use agricultural methods that are more in line with my values. Last year I planted my own garden. This year, as the prices of food and other commodities have steadily risen, I have watched my choices move increasingly into the mainstream.

Yogis like to talk about the pain that comes with the moment of realization that one is not living up to one’s potential as a human being. This awareness necessarily precedes any positive change, but it is painful nonetheless. For me, the awareness of where my food comes from led to a whole series of other painful realizations about how my basic needs are met, about how little control or even knowledge I have with respect to these things. So, in thinking about how to live, I have been actively searching for communities that have achieved at least some autonomy with respect to their food supply, their water supply, their energy supply, and the treatment of their waste. It is this search that brought me to southern Mexico, to a cloud forest turned cattle ranch turned agricultural cooperative.

Now, as I contemplate this question of how to live, of how to move from painful awareness to real change, I feel that my heart is being pulled in two directions. On the one hand, I am a thoroughly urban person. I love being able to walk, ride my bike, and take public transportation to every place I need to go. I love corner markets and corner bars. I love neighborhoods and dog parks and community gardens. I love clubs and shows and 24 hour diners. I am also convinced that if our species is to have a future on this planet, we must find a way to make cities work, since over half the world’s population now lives in them. On the other hand, I love the great outdoors. I love walking through woods, swimming in lakes, working in the sun. I love quiet. I love stars. In a rural area it seems possible that I might find or help create a community that handles its own food, water, energy, and waste needs; whereas in a city, this task is so daunting as to feel nearly impossible. Still, as much I loved being at Las Cañadas, and as deeply as I respect and admire the life in which I was immersed there, I can’t shake the feeling that the question of how I myself shall live has an entirely different answer from the one that is expressed there.