Are they crazy or am I? The nonconformist's dilemma

I sit here, at home in the middle of a forest, in the middle of a day, in the middle of a week, with my kids and wife home. Outside my window, in the front of my house, is a strange garden. There are fallen trees cut and arranged in a manner that is reminiscent of a stone henge mixed with a druid shrine, arbors, circular mounds, trellises, and stone spirals interconnect to sketch an elaborately convoluted structure in the landscape. There is no lawn, no curb, no neighbor, no borders. This is my life, my way, I live it with conviction. But it isn’t always easy.

I find it extremely hard to relate to those who’ve followed the path manufactured and configured for them from before the time they were born. It’s a way designed so everyone, regardless of ability, can contribute to the machine we endearingly refer to as country. Hospital, school, work, suburb, car, commute, shop, retire, hospital, die. Sports, sitcoms, movies, news, and ads fill in all the empty spots between. I never went to school, I was homeschooled, I had a short-lived college career and I worked from home the majority of my adult life. Watching professional sports wasn’t a part of my home culture. The “game” was never on in my house. I grew up in what they now define as “inner city” or “urban”. Which means most people around me were black and poor. My mother is white from a small town in PA, my Father was a New York City bred Puerto Rican. Nobody, I mean nobody, homeschooled their kids where I grew up. I was the only white kid wherever I went. As you’re reading this, I’m sure you can tell, there’s little overlap with my life and most American’s. I never felt like I had a culture or a country. I’m not related.

Somewhere in all this mix, I discovered the only thing I can really relate to is earth. It was she who birthed us, she who holds our entire history, she who knows what we are. Everything we call life is just a thin film on top of a deep, great, ancient beast, that spins in an infinite ocean of chemicals, dust, light, darkness, mystery, and force. Our structures are like dominos that the universe can swipe and be done with. A mere hiccup from the earth could lay waste to all of our borders and routes. I stopped identifying with society, and let what I am, begin to manifest: a wild creature, a feral human, unkept and unbound.

Even to me that sounds crazy. Choosing to opt out of normalcy in America is a difficult path. Every single thing is designed to coerce us into a certain mode of thinking and acting. There are so few choices one is allowed to make without falling into the void of publicly agreed upon insanity. Everything has a ruling body that defines what is acceptable and right. If you want to grow a garden, you must send a soil sample to the state university and ask them which products to put in your soil, which seeds to purchase, which products to spray on your plants, and all of this when, where, and how. If you follow all of these things, congratulations, you did it properly like a good little citizen, you can now pride yourself in your large tomatoes which you were told wouldn’t grow without the strict regiment they so graciously provided for you. But you’ll never know if this is true. If you want your children to be educated you must send them to a state governed institution that decides, without consent from the citizens, what is important and not important for your children to learn, what behavior should be rewarded and punished, and the best methods of teaching them. Other countries might do this well, but sorry America, you are miserably failing. High school graduates need to be retaught everything the first two years of college, which is especially convenient since that is two years of paying for education they should have already received for free. But I digress, our world is run by institutions that have much more power than mere law, they decide what is considered sane and insane. They have the controlling power of our culture. They can say the emperor's clothes are exquisite, and we’ll all nod our heads in agreement while seeing him naked.

So I often ask myself, "am I insane for seeing him naked? Does everyone else really see these exquisite clothes they are telling us exist? Am I the one who is unenlightened, mislead, insane?" I periodically have flashes of immense self-doubt and fears of insanity. When you go outside of the institution, you do not have the masses validating your sanity, or the institution’s stamp of approval. I only have my conviction, and there’s nothing especially great about me that would say I’m not susceptible to deeply incorrect and dangerous thinking. Until all of my work has had time to mature, I receive no validation. Each failure, however, is a sharp attack on my way of life and philosophy which make overcoming that failure that much more challenging.

This brings me to my final point, the deepest thing we are taught in school and work is to crave the validation of our authorities and peers. It becomes oxygen to our ego and self-identity. So much so that we form our ego and identity based on what others approve of, and suppress everything that is outside of that small limiting sphere. Only the insane or the insanely brave can overcome this and comfortably live outside of that sphere. And I’m not sure which I am yet. This is my dilemma. Time will tell.

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Shameless plug

To read this illustrated in poetic form, the struggle of breaking borders and loosing self identity to escape the pressures of conformity, checkout my Smoke poem