COPYRIGHT

      Thorsons

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in the USA by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, 2020

      This edition published by Thorsons, 2020

      © Dallas Hartwig 2020

      Cover layout design by Rhys Willson © HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

      Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com

      Interior design by Joy O’Meara

      Illustrations © Alexis Seabrook

      A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

      Dallas Hartwig asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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      Source ISBN: 9780008339753

      Ebook Edition © March 2020 ISBN: 9780008339746

      Version 2020-02-06

      CONTENTS

       Cover

Other Books By

       Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

PART ONE | GETTING STUCK

ONE Beaten Down by Being Normal

TWO It Starts with Sleep

       THREE Food Doesn’t Have to Be So Hard

       FOUR Moving to the Rhythm

       FIVE People Matter Most

       PART TWO | GETTING UNSTUCK

       SIX Anchors

       SEVEN Pivot to Heal: Fall and Therapeutic Winter

       EIGHT Your Life Beyond

       Acknowledgments

       Appendix: Seasonal Eating

       Notes

       Index of searchable terms

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

       INTRODUCTION

      In 1975, a few years before I was born, my parents bought a very small, century-old log cabin in the rural township of Merrickville in eastern Ontario, Canada. It actually wasn’t much of a log cabin. The roof had caved in, and a porcupine was living inside. Still, the land was scenic, mostly wooded, with a few fields that had been cleared by hand about one hundred years earlier. My parents politely asked the porcupine to leave, and for that first summer they lived in the old barn until they could make the cabin habitable again. Then they moved in and made it their home.

      As pragmatic, countercultural young adults in the early 1970s, their idea was to live simply, away from the rat race of hectic, urban civilization, and that’s exactly what they proceeded to do, continuing this lifestyle even after my sister and I came along. When I say that we lived away from civilization, I’m not exaggerating. The cabin was located on one hundred acres at the very end of a dead-end dirt road, many miles from the nearest store or town. Even after it was renovated, it had no electricity or running water. Today, people grumble if they’re without the internet for an hour, but we had to pump our water by hand. Showers? Forget about it—we took baths every so often in a tin washtub.

      We heated the house with firewood cut from the property, and our single modern luxury was a propane-powered lantern. Oh, and we had an outhouse—not terribly appealing during those frigid Ontario winters. We grew much of our food in a vegetable garden, eating a vegetarian diet and preserving a lot of the food we grew for later months. We had chickens for eggs and goats for milk. A couple of days a week, my mom drove to a town nearby to work at a part-time job. My dad stayed home full time to tend to the house, take care of us kids, keep the garden going, cut wood, and perform other essential tasks. My sister and I spent most of our days outside, exploring the woods, playing with our dog and cat, reading, and daydreaming.

      Throughout each day, we lived in sync with the natural rhythms all around us. Because our only light came from oil lamps, the woodstove, and our single, luxurious propane lantern, we organized our schedule according to the sun’s movement. When the sun rose, we got up. When it set, we wound down and headed to bed. During the winter, this meant that we slept a great deal, since there wasn’t much we could do in the dim light of an oil lamp. In general, our life became much quieter and more intimate during the winter months. In the cold, dark winter we appreciated the warmth of the fire, and the close connections with each other. The summer was totally different: it was light outside until nine or ten o’clock, so we were much more energetic and physically active, and we slept less.

      I had no inkling of it as a child, but in living according to nature’s rhythms, we were living the way human beings have been doing for most of our history. For most of human history, our ancestors existed as hunters and gatherers, roaming in small bands and living in close contact with their natural surroundings.¹ They were not “living off the land,” but rather were part of the land. Only about ten thousand to twelve thousand years ago did our Homo sapiens ancestors gradually transition to agricultural societies, with permanent settlements, commerce, and “civilization” arising shortly afterward.² The developments in manufacturing and mechanization following the Industrial Revolution (ca. 1740–1840) only took us farther from the earth’s natural rhythms. For the last several hundred years, human beings have gravitated to urban centers, as our eating and lifestyle habits have largely been determined by factory timetables and economic efficiency considerations instead of what is optimal for human wellness.³ Like my own family, a band of ancient hunter-gatherers woke with the rising sun, were active and apart during the day, and reconnected in the evening before going to sleep after it got dark. Over the course of the year, they stayed in tune with seasonal variations. Rather, they lived in tune with those variations. There