A cabin on a lake in the New Hampshire woods

This morning I received email from the guys I visited a few months ago in New Hampshire about the scheduling of the sweat lodge I'm hoping to attend in the coming weeks. I replied, letting them know what weekends I would and wouldn't be available.

But I was struck by something. Those two days with men I had previously only communicated with through the wonders of the Internet has sunk into my soul. I am changed from the experience, in ways that I probably don't realize.

Of course, one way that I do very much realize is that I want to get out of New York City. Or, more precisely, I want to get out of the city. I want to live rural. Not today, not tomorrow, but eventually. With welding certification, I'll be able to get a job. That's just about guaranteed. Welding is a needed skill. And it's fairly ubiquitously in demand. Now, that job will likely pay $10 to $12 an hour. By New York City standards, that's not a lot. In fact, that's not enough to live on. But in vast swaths of this great land of ours, that's solidly middle class. In fact, in Schuykill County, Pennsylvania, I could probably have a quality of life that surpasses what I now have here in the Greater New York Metropolitan Area.

And it would be rural. A wee house with a dungeon out back somewhere. Water, trees, fallow fields... the works. And that's what I'm after.

Before the New Hampshire trip, I wanted that. But New Hampshire Men helped me to flesh out that vision.

And other things fell into place, too. Like the opportunity to live deeply and by your own rules. Uncompromising. I don't think I'm idealizing New Hampshire Men. They're just guys. They're doing the best they can with the hands they've been dealt just like we all are, subject to the same doubts and qualms and unfulfilled dreams. But I sense a certain right-ness to how they're living their lives. A sense that they wouldn't have it any other way. I tend to be plagued with the same harpies that tormented Henderson the Rain King in Saul Bellow's book: "I want I want I want" without being able to really identify what it is that I do want.

I want not to want. That's what I want.

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