4 Reader Responses

1. Steve Mills Says:
   April 21st, 2008 at 6:41 pm

   I have always been fascinated by drifters, wanderering ascetics and those that live a transitory lifestyle. It intrigues me that there are still people out there that live this lifestyle, that survive doing this. I think that although at times it would be hard, it would also be a rich life of never ending possibility, and one that was lived closer to reality/truth/nature/whatever then the average consumerist wage slave could ever imagine.

   I consider myself a bit of an Internet Drifter as well, searching through the interwebs for information, following whatever thought takes me along winding path of links and through the forest of blogs.

2. Big Elk Says:
   April 21st, 2008 at 7:32 pm

   one that was lived closer to reality/truth/nature/whatever then the average consumerist wage slave could ever imagine.

   There’s no lifestyle that’s closer to the truth than any other when you get down to it… It’s all true. It’s all real.

3. Julia Says:
   April 21st, 2008 at 8:54 pm

   I don’t know why I never thought of telling you this story before but now seems like the right time. My mother had a friend from church who would come over to our house and not leave for days. She had several mailing addresses and carried several bags with her but they were just bags full of bags.

   She used the excuse of picking up her mail to keep wandering from place to place. She was an older woman and had many children and grandchildren she kept in frequent contact with but she would never stay for long.

   She didn’t always plans her trips well and had to be rescued often. Finally we had to call her family because we thought she had run out of her medication for diabetes and we couldn’t get straight info from her. My mom has a friend who had worked all of her life in nursing homes and this friend told her that older people often become wanderers. Wanderers seems to be the name for them.

   So, this makes me think that wandering is built into us in the same ways as banding together and forming rigid communities.

4. Big Elk Says:
   April 22nd, 2008 at 10:42 am

   Have heard talk of in Hinduism there being life stages, one of which is being a member of a household and raising a family, and after that is going off into the woods and becoming a beggar or whatever. I think Campbell talks about it. Also:

   http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html

   Other people have what they need;
   I alone possess nothing.
   I alone drift about,
   like someone without a home.
   I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty.