Everyone, at one time or another, has wished for the world to disappear, if only for a moment. We’ve wished for space to breathe, for a clarity only available when the harsh glare of the everyday disappears, for a silence so clarion in its call that time slows as we try to discern the meaning in an absence. The experience of these moments is fleeting in our modern world of cacophonous resonances that echo everywhere, endlessly.
But, perhaps, it isn’t as endless as it seems. The unironically entitled documentary, Happy People (available at Acorn), is about a group of people happily living the most basic of existences in the Siberian Taiga. The main focus is on a trapper and the life he ekes out for himself and his family in one of the harshest biomes in the world. The unforgiving nature, and the unrelenting beauty, of the area act as touchstones by which to measure the true nature of human existence, peace and true happiness.
For me, however, the ultimate definition of true solitude, peace, happiness and beauty comes by the way of a man named Dick Proenneke. He left the world behind and never looked back. He spent decades living alone in the Alaskan wilderness and he captured it all in a series of diaries and on film. Alone in the Wilderness and its sequel, Alaska, Silence and Solitude, capture the heart of humanity laid bare. What truths the human heart and mind and body hold are all here: the meaning of living versus existing; the power of true beauty to blur the human eye and touch the human heart in unimaginable ways; the triumph of the spirit when survival is at stake; and the ingenuity and resourcefulness inherent to the unbroken, billion-year line of human heritage that connects us all.
So, join me in a celebration of spirit, solitude, beauty and peace, if you will…oh, wait, you already have.