There is a special magic behind thinking about abandoning everything and living in nature. The idea –already insane for this time– is attractive to all those restless spirits who have wanted, countless times, to give up what the modern world offers. And in this deep search for other life options, he connects with the original idea of his organic origins and the possibility of returning to inhabit a natural world.
In modern times, there have been many brave men who have brought to the level of a philosophy the idea of abandoning everything. Travelers who have wandered until they find their place in the world, or have known exactly where they want to go. Perhaps due to an automaton sense of rejection towards what does not belong to us as human beings, or perhaps because they feel sufficiently suffocated by modernity, these men have decided to enter the organic world to lead a life, although not at all easy, very comforting in the company of nature.
Mountains, jungles or sierras are the places where these seven people have decided to build their home. Is about inspiring examples of workers, artists and poets who mustered enough reasons and enough courage to plunge into the unknown. They dismantle the myth that those who distance themselves from modern life are antisocial, hermits or crazy, and show us the complexity and sacrifice that go into making the decision to leave a global system to get involved in their own.
Henry David Thoreau
This writer left his family home in Concord at a very young age to live on the shores of Walden Lagoon. With this decision he sought to investigate the problems of modern life and test his own reaction to being away from the urban environment of the United States of the 19th century. «I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately only to face the essential facts of life and to see if I could learn what it had to teach and not find, at death, that I had not lived,» he wrote in Walden.
Paul Gauguin
Gauguin was a post-impressionist painter. His style, considered primitivist and pastoral, was a reflection of his love of the natural. In 1891, frustrated by lack of recognition and poverty, he ran away from European civilization and its artificiality. He spent much time in French Polynesia, in Tahiti, where he is believed to have married a native girl, later moving to the Marquesas Islands, a more primitive site that Gauguin sought for inspiration. The paintings of that last stage are full of the exoticism inherent in the inhabitants of Polynesia.
mick dodge
This man even has a documentary in National Geographic where his amazing case is narrated. He moved to the Hoh Forest on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State 25 years ago. He wanted to stop wearing shoes, and so he went and built his house among the branches of the trees in that forest. But his decision did not mean isolation: Mick found in a community of mountaineers the necessary human contact (which does not mean that he cannot walk barefoot, as he likes).
Timothy Treadwell, the «Grizzly Man»
Many know him because German filmmaker Werner Herzog found his case so fascinating that he made it the subject of one of his documentaries. Tim Treadwell was a naturalist amateur and eco warrior who lived among grizzly bears in Katmai National Park. Living in Alaska for 13 years surrounded by bears was Treadwell’s way of escaping the frustrations of his acting career and his addiction to drugs and alcohol. But brave decisions don’t exempt you from the laws of nature, and Treadwell was eventually attacked along with his girlfriend by a bear, killing both of them.
Romayne Wheeler
Composer, musician, painter and poet. An altruistic man who left his life in Vienna and his trips to great world capitals as a pianist to adopt a life that was much more in line with his philosophy, one that he believed did not exist until he visited the Sierra Tarahumara in Mexico. .
He arrived in 1980 and settled on the precipice of the Batopilas canyon, naming his music studio the Nido de Águila. «Here my roots have sunk, here I am part of nature, my life has a reason,» said the veteran pianist in an interview, who defines the mountains as a place where one lives «for others» and where everyone is one.
Hannibal Pireda
This Argentine man cultivated his body to be able to make the trips he wanted. He took his beloved bicycle and toured Argentina in search of humid land to settle. Before that he was a lifeguard, a yoga teacher and a musician, things that now, at 50 years old and already established in the Paraná jungle, he continues to practice. He is currently a park ranger at Misiones, a site that he helped bring to life, turning it into a paradise surrounded by huge trees and fruit plants.
angelo valkenborgh
Her marriage did not work out and she became a nomad. For this young Belgian, that decision was not easy, since his taste for living outdoors made him go into the frozen Siberian forest, in search of a self-sufficient life within a harsh and inhospitable ecosystem. valkenborgh He has said that he will spend 1 decade traveling across Canada, Siberia and Alasaka. Her nomadic life can be followed on Instagram and on her blog, since the little she brought with her was a cell phone that she recharges with sunlight so as not to completely lose contact with humanity.
alexander supertramp
After graduating with honors in history and anthropology from Emory University in 1990, at age 22, Christopher McCandlessbetter known as alexander supertramphe donated his savings (about $24 thousand dollars) to charity and decided to retire to a life far from society, living practically without money and barely with the essential resources to continue traveling and staying alive. The final challenge after 2 years touring the American Union was manage to survive in one of the most inhospitable terrains that can be accessed by road, Alaskan tundra. However, by August of that year his luck changed. While trying to return to the nearby town of Fairbanks, a swollen river blocked his path, making it impossible for him to find his way back. Supertramp perished in August of the same year, due to starvation..
* Images: 1, 4 and 6) Instagram Angelo Valkenborgh
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