Want to Chuck It All and Move to the Country?
Kiss me down by the broken treehouse (#FreedomMusicFriday)
It is 7:27 AM, and I am in my crazy gazebo listening to the rain. And watching it:
I am happy to be here. I love the rain, and I love writing to you all.
I also really like living out here in the exurbs. When we moved back east in 2011 to be closer to family, this location was a compromise. I wanted to live in the middle of nowhere and my wife wanted to live in the ‘burbs, so we settled on a nice development in a small town on the edge of farm country. I still want to go more rural eventually, and we probably will, but this is fine for now.
Yet even my wife, for all her protestations about not wanting to be “too far from people” shows a yen for things natural and rural. She wants us to grow things. She loves country drives. She now appreciates that I insisted that whatever house we buy be backed up to woods rather than more houses. And she certainly longs for a simpler life—perhaps in part as a respite from her complicated, high-pressure job.
And she’s not the only one. We’ve spoken of it before on #FreedomMusicFriday: the urge to move to the country and live a simpler life is a perennial and widely shared human feeling.
You see a farm or country lane and you think, “Ah, how nice.” For many, this sight produces a longing, a sigh, and at least a passing thought of wanting to chuck it all and live the simple life out in the country. Actual farming is quite hard work, of course, but that does not change the beauty of the scenery or the feeling that our modern lives have gotten a bit too complex.
Victorian-era romantics certainly had this feeling—creating beautiful odes to pastoral life in music, painting, and poem. They saw the “dark, Satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution and longed for the cleaner countryside that seemed, for the first time in human history, to be receding into the background.
Unfortunately, this pastoral romanticism helped create the zeitgeist that fueled the rise of socialism. Falling for Bastiat’s fallacy of the seen and the unseen, they gave people a skewed vision of what was actually happening…
What they saw: factories belching smoke, terrible working conditions, child labor. What they did not see (and could not have known): life expectancy and standards of living were rising and infant mortality was falling. What they also did not see: that inside the beautiful barn they just painted, or depicted in a poetic paean to pastoral life, was a four-year-old dying of whooping cough. For all its choking smoke and hard conditions, early modern capitalism was actually making people’s lives better.
Agriculture can be hard. And, as
, , and others will tell you, the off-grid, rural self-sufficiency lifestyle isn’t easy either. Yet the feeling remains: you see the countryside and the simpler life and think, “Wouldn’t it be nice?”Something about our lives has become too complex. Or maybe we evolved to be closer to the Earth and that yearning is always within us.
I certainly couldn’t help but have these feelings when I ran across The Petersons’ cover of “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer. The setting, their clothes, their folky take on this pretty song all contributed to that feeling, and I thought you might enjoy it too.
Needless to say, the lyrics convey our theme of a simpler life in the country. The natural beauty (bearded barley, green green grass) is matched by the innocent sweetness of nightly kisses among dancing fireflies.
The lyric isn’t Take me in the alley behind the rave club. It’s Kiss me beneath the milky twilight. There is a sense of innocence not lost all of a sudden, but relinquished naturally and slowly. The treehouse is broken now, but the tire swing is still there. This boy and girl, who have probably known each other since they were babies, are still swinging on that swing…but now they’re kissing too. Not to thumping techno in a dark club, but under the sparkling silver moon.
We could carry this further—taking “the trail on your father’s map” is a signal that they are becoming adults themselves, but slowly, with a tie to their youth and to the land. It’s nicer. It’s more organic and natural.
So tell me—do you feel it? And does it make you kind of want it?
Viking Fox says, “Don’t leave me hangin’, bro—buy me a cup of coffee please!”
Great post. yes, there are always trade offs. No more sleeping in when you move to the countryside and have animals to care for, no more delivery, no more quick trips to town......it's hard, but a different kind of hard, the kind that feeds the soul instead of zaps it....the kind that establishes genuine connection with something greater rather than "appearing" to with labels....the days where the only song is the music played by the rain or sung by the birds....oh how the world needs more porch sitting and less virtual sifting.
We raise or hunt about 50% of our food. Chickens, rabbits, ducks, turkeys, deer, a stocked pond, huge garden, close to 50 fruit trees, grape vines, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries. Burn firewood for heat, built solar water heaters. I've never paid anyone to do or fix anything in my life. I built my mom a tiny house on our property largely from scrap I collected. We homeschooled all 11 of our children and now have close to 30 grandchildren, with new ones on the way all the time. Just had another son get married last week.
It's hard, dirty, back breaking work, and now that I'm in my 60s it's exponentially harder. I wouldn't romanticize it, but I also wouldn't trade it for the world.