walking

These days I am torn between wanting to stay here forever and wanting to leave tomorrow.
I love how in this country you can build a life with your bare hands. You build it out of bricks and wood and roofing tiles, a plot of land, whatever plants you deem fit, cows and chickens and dogs. You craft it to your whims and desires and, more often, necesities. In the USA one could acheive the end of a simple life only through complicated means. In order to even realize you want a simple life you probably have to go to college, take on debt, and make yourself overqualified for honest labor.
As I ramble about on the country roads and through unfenced fields the countryside here is so beautiful as to be intoxicating. It is as lovely a landscape as any I have ever seen. It is more beautiful because it is a living, working landscape. There regular people building homes and making their lives from the land here. There are many beautiful places in the states, and the puget sound is surely one of them. But in America the beautiful places have been roped off; they have been set aside by necessity so that we don't destroy them by our own rapaciousness. Working land in America is a clear cut forest, a removed mountain top mine, a monocultural expanse, or a feedlot.
I am just seeing a snapshop of the land here, which was once all rainforest. In ten years it is likely that there will be no forest left. At the current moment however, the small feilds bordered by patches of tree and streams, and hills rolling off into the distance is enchanting.

This sentiment overwhelms me when I am out walking. When I return home I gradually accept the reality that with my student loans it would be impossible to make a permanent home here. Then I think of my friends and family, Portland, good beer, and Vashon beaches and I want to drop everything now and go. I go back and forth in my head like this every day.