It’s fascinating that in Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man, she exposes Eustace Conway with all his physical abilities and his social disabilities as clearly as a camera can capture clouds shape-shifting across the sky. Yet she barely helps us to connect the dots on Eustace’s Achilles’ heel, until she quotes Cuchullaine O’Reilly, “the foremost authority on the history of long-distance equestrian travel” (page 187) explaining that Eustace Conway, that long-distance horse rider, “needs to go on a spiritual journey” (page 189) to sort himself out. It reminds me of the words of that old song: ”
Oh, I’ve been to Georgia and California and anywhere I could run
I took the hand of a preacher man and we made love in the sun
But I ran out of places and friendly faces because I had to be free
I’ve been to paradise but I’ve never been to me.
And who goes on a spiritual journey? Eustace Conway? No, Elizabeth Gilbert does, in Eat, Pray, Love, a book I loved reading, which is why I went looking for anything else she’d written.
Elizabeth Gilbert is a thoroughly satisfying writer. In her epic story of Eustace Conway, she describes him minutely, gives us in-your-face stories, shocks us with her exposé of his poor family relationships and dissatisfactory love relationships and even work relationships. While Eustace is a brilliant frontier man, a man who has achieved every physical task he has ever set himself, he sucks at relationships. But somehow, that loses its significance when we step back and look through the lens that he holds up to the world, to see it more clearly for ourselves.
Using Eustace’s words (page 18 & 19), Elizabeth compares the circularity of his lifestyle with the square box-like lifestyle that most North Americans call life.
I live in nature, where everything is connected, circular. The seasons are circular. The planet is circular, and so is its passage around the sun. The course of water over the earth is circular, coming down from the sky … The life cycles of plants and animals are circular… The ancient people understood that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost sight of that.
Do people live in circles today? No. They live in boxes… the box of their bedroom… breakfast out of a box… the box where they live… a box with wheels… work… another big box broken up into lots of little cubicle boxes… computer boxes… house boxes… television boxes… music from a box… food from a box… clothing in a box… they live their lives in a box!
His vision is to show the American people that it is possible to do what they want to do, to live off the land, to reconnect with the earth. Living at Turtle Island, one thousand acres of North Carolina that he acquired piece by piece, he would hold camps for American children to reconnect them with nature, for instance, by teaching them First Nation games that would involve rolling a hoop. And he found that the children couldn’t roll a hoop (page 211).
I watch these kids and I think, ‘Can this unbelievable crisis be real?’ … It’s a question of understanding natural law. The world is ruled by a few basic physical laws – leverage, inertia, momentum, thermodynamics – and if you’re out of touch with these fundamental principles, then you can’t hammer a nail, carry a bucket, or roll a wheel. That means you’re out of touch with the natural world… you’ve lost your humanity and … you live in an environment that you completely do not understand.
As a child, Eustace kept and fed a hundred or so turtles in his backyard, learned how to throw a knife and to hit his target with a bow and arrow. He moved into the mountains aged 17 and has lived by his own devices ever since. At Turtle Island, Eustace tried to train young Americans – apprentices – how to live as he does. They didn’t come anywhere near the standard that Eustace set for them and most of them left disillusioned, not with the goal or the vision, but with the lack of empathy that accompanied the teaching.
Nevertheless, Eustace’s philosophy, as captured by Elizabeth Gilbert, is worth remembering.
Show up for your own life…. Don’t pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle-feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an instant-gratification sugar coma. The most extraordinary gift you’ve been given is your own humanity, which is about consciousness….
Revere your senses; don’t degrade them with drugs, with depression, with wilful oblivion. Try to notice something new every day…. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details…. Notice what food tastes like; notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses…. Don’t pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge…. [M]aturity will follow mindfulness even as day follows night.
Eustace’s message is so vital and so pertinent for waking up to really see the dross of life today. How did we drift so far away from living with nature? Why do we prefer to eat food from a package rather than food from a meadow? Why do we put aluminum in our clothes and leave chlorine in our water? Why did we forget that we create our bodies daily from the food we eat and the water we drink? Why do we not realise that we recreate our thoughts daily from whatever we notice,whether that comprises commercial and violent messages from the media or prayers of gratitude? Why do we recreate our emotional world from the anger of some movies and the lack of caring of the bottom line.
As Eustace says on page 211,
It took mankind one million years to learn how to roll a wheel; but it only took us fifty years to forget.
I want to remember what I can, now. I am showing up for this life. I want to sew myself back into nature. Thank you, Eustace and Elizabeth, for showing us the seams that have torn.
Best of health, naturally,
Nina