Having turned in my electronic ID badge, and cleaned out my cubicle at the Housing Authority Central Office, I now find myself becalmed in the middle of a weekday morning watching the small movements of alder leaves in the rain. My recent leap from life as an inner-city social worker to that of rural artisan and homesteader means that country living, and the reasons for it, are squarely in the center of my thoughts.

I have a fondness for cities, and a respect for the crucial functions they serve. A nation and a culture need their urban areas, and world-class cities offer the best testimony, the furthest articulation, of what human beings are capable of creating. There’s nothing in the countryside that could replace the experience of being out in the streets, singing and dancing with thousands of strangers on the night Barack Obama was elected president. Being in a city reminds us that we belong to history, that we participate in the humming global network of human progress.

However, living in the country reminds us that we belong to something as well; it’s a more intimate sense of belonging, in a web which is more primal and more immediate. Your place in the sweep of history may be far from your thoughts as you hike up a quiet trail in the woods, but your membership in basic animal nature will be evident with every breath.

In the city, where the landscape in all directions is manufactured and constructed, it’s easy to fall prey to an inflated sense of humanity’s role in the world. Gazing out from the 25th floor of a downtown office building, or even from the soft front seat of your car at a multi-lane intersection, you can’t help but be lured into an illusion that nature has been tamed. If it’s a stormy day, you’re likely to be in a climate-controlled environment, and events outside the window are about as relevant to you as your screen saver.

When you encounter the land on its own terms, unconquered by the planning, rectifying and designing of human beings, you are humbled. The soil is heavy and wet, the freezing rain formidable, the sheer weight of a falling branch something you have to take into account. When you stand at the base of a tree looking for the right place to set the chainsaw bar, your own vulnerability is all too obvious. The distance from sources of emergency aid is equally humbling. It reminds you that we don’t after all have every square inch of life insured, that there are no guarantees, that risk is part of being alive. You live face to face with the awareness of your own mortality, and this causes you to make sure your priorities are in order.

Living far from services leads to a different awareness in a couple other realms as well. Certainly shopping takes much longer, and you’ll probably make the most of each trip by stacking up a list of errands to do all at once. But if you’re REALLY far from everything, as we are, you’re sometimes forced into an appreciation of the simple things. You’ll relish the taste and juiciness of those last two oranges much more intensely when you know you won’t be anywhere near a store for the next two weeks. If a rabbit comes and eats all the kale out of your winter garden, then you may go without fresh greens til you can trade off something with a neighbor. You and the rabbit were both after the same food source, and the rabbit got to it before you did. It’s not fun to compete for food, but you can’t avoid a certain flash of biological commonality there.

Speaking of neighbors, life in tiny towns has no anonymity. What happens when anonymity disappears? You may be safe from marauding strangers, and you don’t have to lock your doors at night - but you are not safe from yourself. You are known fully, for all your virtues and all your flaws. Your political views, how fast you drive, what you said to your daughter’s second grade teacher; it all accumulates as context for your future interactions with your neighbors. People can be forgiven for their difficult qualities if they have some sterling virtues to balance things out, but there is no possibility of facade. If someone offends you, you have to come to terms with the fact that the person isn’t going anywhere, and you’ll be interacting with them for years to come.

When we need one another on a simple daily basis, we can’t write each other off. To live like this requires emotional stamina, but if you can stand it you will develop a gritty sense of human interdependence, of acceptance, and even of mercy. And I think, as I stare out at those many leaves attached to that one tree, that this is ultimately why I’ve come out here. I’m not here because I want to escape the freeway commute, or because I’m tired of clocking in every day at the office - although I do enjoy the freedom from those things. I’m not even here strictly for the beauty, although it does flood me with wellbeing each morning freshly when I step outside for firewood. I am here because I am hungry for the work of primal connectedness, this deep inescapable awareness that we are one with all that is alive, members together of a natural community of the living.