One of my more charming fantasies is that I’m the first, last, and only person ever to question how the world is run. Whatever the Big Solution is, I have to get cracking and do it because Everyone Else is too busy slaving away to pay off their life insurance.

It’s an unpleasant fantasy; one more way to feel important, I suppose. Amazing what we’ll go through to get that feeling. I’ll bark my shins a hundred times before I stop seeing the world through me-colored glasses.

But like the life I plan to escape, the fantasy isn’t sustainable. What about the pile of books I had to read before a better lifestyle even occurred to me? Unless I plan to leap into all-out solipsism (which would mean, among other tragedies, quitting this blog, now), I have to admit that the great Everyone Else does not include the people who wrote those books.

Still, authors are distant. Lately I’ve been blessed with an incessant bumping into real live people besides me who want to get some land and build houses and culture. I know at least two young couples who talk like they might really do it, and I’ve had lovely planning conversations with both of them in the last week. Then there are the many other friends who seem more than idly curious.

And there’s the Internet. I recently found a page with links to over 1000 sites that focus on some facet of sustainable living, and that must be a tiny fraction of what’s out there. Lest you think the search for a sane lifestyle is solely in the hands of New Agers, Wiccans, and the many churches of Health (so sadly divided), there’s even a chat group for simple living Catholics, fullofgraceII. (Apparently we missed the first one.)

On a completely unrelated note, my spell checker doesn’t recognize “sustainable” or “Catholics”. Ominous. But then, it doesn’t recognize the “doesn” in “doesn’t” either.

Anyhow, this tiny bundle of links I’ve bagged in my wanderings doesn’t begin to scratch the surface, and that’s the point. I’ve only been posting to fullofgraceII for a couple weeks, and already folks are sending me real estate ads for woodlands in Maine. I can chat with people who’ve been homesteading to various degrees for decades. I can find the web sites of hundreds more. People are doing it all over the place.

I guess you’re already on the Internet, so perhaps you know what I’ve been slow to discover: there’s always at least one other person online who shares your hopes. Probably thousands. What a grand tool.

Now if I can only step through the looking glass and find a place where I spend my time with those people and not just their words. Well, all in good time.