Introduction

I am homeless.

Hopefully I won’t be by the time you are reading this. If by chance this work goes to press (a process not known for its alacrity), something will have gone terribly amiss if I am still out a place.

Its not that I’m poor. In fact, I have two very nice jobs (one of them even gives me health insurance). Rather, I chose to be homeless… to live for a time below my means. I had a perfectly fine apartment, and while it was by far the most I had ever spent on housing, between my two nice jobs I made all the money work. In this, I was not driven by my bank account.

No, my decision to eschew the trappings of civilization was motivated by a different sort of accounting. Part of my aim by writing for you now is to make sense of how that intentional vagrancy came to pass. I imagine that trying to explain it to you will help me understand better as well.

The second purpose of this writing is as an articulation of my thinking while I am homeless. While all experience educates, I can confidently say that becoming homeless has been one my life’s most vivid teachers. These nights in the darkness of the wild have illuminated life as I knew it.

I suppose that’s the other important bit. My homeless condition is lived out in a somewhat unconventional setting. Do not picture my possessions stored in a hijacked grocery cart, or my bed in a cranny beneath an overpass. Imagine instead my car packed with essentials, and my nightly refuge as a tent tucked away in the wilderness.

I consider my naturalistic homelessness only somewhat unconventional because there is actually some precedence for such a lifestyle. While it isn’t the vision of modern vagrancy (many homeless are also in poverty, and they rely on the chaff and charity of the more fortunate to survive), humanity has a long history of nature-seeking asceticism.

Thoreau had a little cabin near Walden Pond.
Siddhartha had a bowl for rice and a Boddhi tree.


I have a one-man tent I pitch nightly in a little canyon on the northern tip of the Los Angeles basin, and for my part I am both participant in and observe the goings on of that sprawling mass of humanity. Each night after I hike down into the canyon proper, past the ranger station and picnic benches, and I enter the wild by crossing the stream that runs out of the mountains by hopping from rock to rock.

And each night, when I have safely crossed to the other side, I turn back and regard the world I have left. I’m close enough that I can still see the persistent glow of the city, but far enough that above it all I can still see the movement of the stars.