Last week I drove up to visit my Dad in a tiny town in the Northeastern part of California, the part of California that everyone forgets about.   A part of California that wants to secede from the state actually, along with parts of southern Oregon and northern Nevada – to become ‘The State of Jefferson’ – they have a flag and everything.  Most residents have a strong hatred for the rest of California, and these rural areas certainly have a stark cultural difference to the rest of the state.

It’s only one of the many small towns my family moved to while I was growing up, in southern Utah, Eastern Oregon, Eastern Washington and Northern California.  While each of these small towns were very unique, there are many common threads that run through rural America.

This town where my Dad now lives again is where my grandpa settled after World War 2, where he built a small wood cabin and started raising beef cattle after finishing his service in the Navy building ships in the San Francisco Bay Area.  My Dad moved us back to this town around the time my parents divorced, where we lived for a few years during my childhood.  It is beautiful country, with sprawling views and the scent of sagebrush and pine.  It is the essence of the wild west.

While driving the familiar route, hours from any metropolitan area, my partner Mark and I drove through town after tiny town town – the kind where if you blink you may actually miss it.  Buildings that herald from both the 1800’s and the 1950’s line the road, many boarded up and empty.  Businesses shuttered in communities that once thrived under different industries, where corporate farming and logging have elbowed in.  People now drive a few hours to shop in the big box stores of Redding rather than whatever mercantile stores used to thrive in these areas.

Most people are ranchers out here, raising cattle and growing hay.  Many of the smaller farms are owned by families who have been in the area for generations.  As you drive over the rolling hills you’re likely to see a bald eagle flying, I saw two this time.  The other thing flying at the tall gate posts of the ranches are Trump flags – ‘Make America Great Again’.  

Where there is still activity in these small towns, it genuinely feels like a time capsule.  Most of the towns have a Frosty Freeze, where you can go get your ice cream.  There are family owned coffee shops where local ranchers gather in the morning for hot coffee and breakfast after feeding their cattle each morning in the frosty fields.  

I have so many good memories of my time growing up in this area for a few years.  There is a simplicity and a nostalgia.  I always like to say that my grandpa was ‘one of the last real cowboys.’  I have memories of going on cattle drives by horseback, camping overnight in the sagebrush around a fire while herding the cattle to and from the BLM land where they graze over the summer.  

Growing up on the ranch, in these small towns, is where I know I developed my strong connection with nature.  Growing our own food in gardens – my Dad shared that there is now a local co-op where people share the fruit & vegetables they grow on their farms with each other.  Connecting closely with animals, bonding with the bummer lambs we raised, bunnies, dogs and horses.  I wouldn’t be the same person without having spent time in this environment.

Most people never leave their home towns.  They might move a couple hours away to a neighboring town that feels like ‘getting away’ but is still a close flavor culturally.  

Many people like the isolation of these small towns, away from the noise and hustle & bustle.  Away from the crime in the cities, although substance addiction, domestic violence and hate crimes are just as present rurally (I won’t tell you the story I heard this time, about an older gay bay area man who moved to the area a few years ago to retire, and is now being harassed by his neighbor in attempts to scare him off).

I can understand the desire for quietness, wilderness and isolation. There is something peaceful and freeing in these wide open spaces.  There is also a sense of many people hiding behind their fences and not wanting to be bothered.  To each their own.

The people in these areas don’t want to be told what to do, and I get it.  Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m the QUEEN of not wanting to be told what to do (my body my choice)!  Any form of regulations by the government is seen as overreach in these areas. ‘Why can’t I drill this hole? Why can’t I cut this tree? Why can’t I divert this stream?’ 

 It’s understandable when living in an area of wide open spaces, and it harkens to a time in our nation’s history when you could just show up on a piece of land and claim it.  Place your homestead and make what you want of it (I also won’t go into the topic of colonization here, but of course it is relevant).  This isolationist mentality harkens back to the day when population was sparse and land was wide.

During the Wild West times, in 1790 the USA had a population of 3.9 million and only 5% of that lived West of the Appalachian Mountains.  Dig all the holes you like!  Take water from all the streams that you need.  By the 1890’s population was up to 62 million.  Current population is 334 million people.  

No regulations works in a time where there is a tiny population.  When someone rarely leaves one small rural area, they don’t see how their land is multiplied and integrally connected to a much wider world where population continues to expand and sprawl. Eventually there must be some thought about how our individual actions (multiplied) start shaping the entire ecosystem and society.  

The world has grown and will continue to do so.  Having zero regulation and total freedom to do whatever/wherever is no longer practical.  I get it, filing for permits and waiting to take actions or even being told no is annoying as fuck, I’m sure there’s a lot we can do to streamline things.  But in these areas of time capsules, it’s hard for people to see how individual actions translate into interconnectivity to the larger world.  And in our hyper individualistic society, we are not taught to care about the other – only ourselves.

As I dipped back into this time capsule of rural America, I began thinking about nostalgia and not wanting change.  This place makes me feel nostalgic, but change is something I had to adapt to early on in my life.   My Dad was a pastor and we moved from town to town every 3-4 years (this is another story for another time in an upcoming podcast), so change was a constant.  

I have a visceral memory when I was about 5yo and we were moving back to my grandpa’s ranch, riding in the truck with my Mom who was crying and said, ‘I hate change.’  Change is hard.  We write it in yearbooks, ‘Never change!’ and yet we all know it’s unavoidable – that we are constantly sitting on its precipice. 

Working as a therapist and coach now, change is the number one focus.  We resist change, we fight it, we want stability and consistency.  Consistency triggers ‘safety’ for our nervous system, however it’s also a losing battle because the only constant in life is change.

And if we’re not fighting to stop change, then we’re pushing for it so desperately and feeling frustrated by the lack of it when we don’t like the current situation.  Learning how to cope with change is a whole skillset.  It’s one I had to start developing young, and one that I still struggle with.

New schools every few years, new bullies, new landscapes, new homes.  These small local towns are not always welcoming of the new outsiders, and I learned that viscerally at each new school.  Human tribalism goes deep into our DNA, ‘Stick together and don’t trust the other!’ 

Of course there were challenges with moving so often and all that change, but I honestly look back on it now with gratitude.  Many people never have the privilege to move, to travel and see different places, different people – to develop the skillset of adaptation. 

My privilege of travel and adapting to change came not just from my Dad’s profession as a pastor, but also through my parent’s divorce when my brother and I began flying back and forth between states for visitations.  My Aunt Tamie lived in San Diego and began hosting us each year for a respite from it all.  

It got me out of the small town and gave me the opportunity to discover more.  It got me out into communities that were not mono-culture, it showed me areas that had in fact developed & progressed in ways that felt like a time jump into the future when compared to the nostalgic time capsules that I had lived in.

None of this is a statement of one being better than the other, they are simply different.  As a child though, when I visited San Diego, something in me always came alive.  Something about the diversity in fashion, people, lifestyles, languages, cultures – it felt like the natural state of humanity.  Nothing about this planet is singular.  All of nature is diverse, and we as humans are part of nature.

Looking back through history you can see the sprawl happening, the migrations, the changing borders, the wars, the colonizations, the railroads, cars, boats and airplanes.  There is really no way to stop the changing of our cultures, the diversification of our planet.  I’m not sure it would even be physically possible to separate everyone into groups behind walls of preservation.  And yet, I do understand the desire.

We do want to protect things and preserve.  When I look at how we are shaping our forests, grasslands and oceans, I hate the changes that we see.  Any culture’s uniqueness at any point in time is worthy of preservation.  

I remember wandering through the British Museum in London, and the Musea Larco in Lima, Peru – where pottery, clothing, books, artwork and even burials are preserved for remembrance.  Cultures that thrived thousands of years ago, which have transformed completely through time.   None of us can stop time.  We exist in a constant state of adaptation & evolution, each moment brand new from a mindfulness perspective.

And so, ‘Make America Great Again.’  Is this promise to reverse time, to freeze time, one that is even possible?  In this small town where my Grandpa settled, like many towns across rural America, there is still a sense of yearning for that ‘lawless’ Wild West life. The glory of the American Dream, homesteading, gold rushing, ‘Don’t tread on me.’  

Can we reverse the clock to the days where cinematic heroes like John Wayne roamed free with no regulations and stark isolationism.  Where it was just you, your homestead and the wild?  We all want to go back to times we idealize, not realizing that those times are mostly in an inflated image that resides only in our imaginations.

When I can get past my anger that so many people got duped by one of the most obvious charlatans of our time, ushering in a corporate ‘boom town’ that’s only going to harm the planet, low & middle class more, promising a preservation of culture – like those static ones at the British Museum – I actually feel sad.  Sad that these people who believe Trump can freeze or reverse time, that he can stop change … they will be let down.   

Learning to cope with change requires us to throw ourselves into it wholeheartedly, to shape it with intention – using the facts of our current reality rather than an idealized image of a past that no longer exists.  In order to do that though, change also requires grief.  It requires a letting go of what was, which can be very painful.

The world will only become more multinational, diverse and mixed.  As population grows our resources will only grow fewer, unless we learn how to regulate ourselves and become more regenerative (nature is actually quite abundant when we can stop the pace of our consumption & hoarding).  And if we don’t start considering more than just ourselves, then our species is doomed.  Stark isolationism and only looking out for ‘MY’ best interest, damn all others, is when humans die.

Science has been shaped by men who only highlighted one aspect of nature, ‘Survival of the Fittest.’  It left out an entire half of nature, which tends to be more present in women, and which you can see in every ecosystem and species (even inter-species) – collaboration (For more on this in depth read The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist).

I’m proud to be from rural America, and I’m also very thankful that I got out to see more.  Human diversity is natural, interesting & beautiful. Collaboration and compromise are meaningful & satisfying. Change can be electrifying & powerful – but only if we can find the willingness to let go, and embrace it.