If you are an intuitive instinctual person living in a city is counterproductive to your long term survival often. This was also true of me.
Always my father and mother would take me to the wilderness on weekends (usually Saturdays) when I was 6 to 12 years old especially. It was the only time I really got to spend with my parents because they were always working either at their jobs or as ministers the rest of the time when they were in charge of a church from 1954 until 1960 when I was 6 to 12 years old. So, wilderness with my parents was an escape from the insanity of the 1950s, then 1960s and beyond.
Growing up in Los Angeles County I always found sort of insane and people died like flies that I knew from various causes in the city. Big cities kill many many people in various different ways.
It's not that living out in the country doesn't also kill people. It's just people die in different ways in the country often than in the city.
So, always I retreated to the wilderness with my parents and my friends and through this I found God in Yosemite National Park when I was around 15 years old. My life began to get better after that and I realized I might not die young at this point.
In the 1950s and 1960s death surrounded us all because of the Cold War and the Viet Nam War into the mid 1970s. So, death stalked us all and we felt it strongly. There was much more a feeling of fear of death then than now in people. Some people still fear death but the place it comes from is completely different because people tend to be so much more out of touch with reality more now than then.
Most people who were as out of touch with reality as people are now died by 10 to 20 years of age then simply because there was no way for them to survive the harshness of life then. Now, there are all sorts of fake ways to survive in a world not real, especially through various media. This wasn't true in the 1950s and 1960s like it is now.
In the 1950s and 1960s you either found a way to live or you died or went insane. That was it.
So, for me, my parents taking me to the wilderness, to the mountains, the deserts and the ocean saved my young life and gave me hope of a future living somewhere in the wilderness as a boy and as a young man. Because I knew even then the city would only drive me to self destruction and suicide eventually if I stayed there.
Knowing this I climbed mountains, I surfed in the ocean, I rode motorcycles across the desert, I met friends who loved the wilderness like myself and we surfed and hiked and rode motorcycles across the deserts together.
Eventually, when I married in 1974 and my son was born I stopped rock climbing so I could stay alive to raise him unlike others of my friends who died rock climbing during the 1970s. Eventually, we moved later in 1974 to Hilo, Hawaii and stayed there awhile until I was injured and couldn't work and had to return home to the mainland.
In 1976 we moved to Mt. Shasta where I had always wanted to live growing up because it was a place of wilderness that I truly loved since I was about 5 years old.
Many people's lives are about career. I find that personally to be a road to suicide only.
The road to survival and happiness has ALWAYS been the road to the most beautiful places on earth.
Without beauty and wilderness in my life, life was only the road to death and nothing else.
So, if I wanted to stay alive I knew going to the wilderness to visit or live was always my way forward while living in a body here on earth.
By God's Grace
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