It is the last Full Moon of 2012, but the sky is overcast here, with snow on the way for tomorrow.

Having the moon obscured feels appropriate, as I am searching for a clarity that continually eludes me.

One thing for sure: this is the new normal, me alone with my dog by my side, sipping a quiet glass of wine by the fire, while my sons are out with their girlfriends.

Get used to it, honey!

After 20 years of hardly ever being alone, now it is coming around again, the long quiet hours I remember from my twenties, when I had seemingly endless time to think and read and write.

It saddens me to think of how I spent those hours, poring over the dry tomes of literary critics and deconstructionists, writing my own oh-so-alienated prose in a weak attempt at mimicry.

I wish I had instead been traveling the world in those years, voyaging and adventuring, meeting interesting people and learning new things.

I went as far as Paris and came home attached to a Mexican.

Married to him, I found myself locked into an endless loop of returning to his home in Mexico City year after year.  There I learned first hand about the power of internal colonization; the subtle and not-so-subtle debasement of women in Mexican society; and how to dance, drink and have a superficially good time.

I spent the past 20 years in what seems in retrospect like hard labor, being the primary caretaker in my home as well as—for nine of those years—working two demanding academic jobs.

Now my second job is gone, eliminated by state budget cuts, and one of my sons is almost launched, having gotten his B.A. last spring and moved to Florida for a job.

I am at the threshold of a new period in my life, and this time, knowing how short and precious a lifetime really is, I want to be more intentional–to make the best use of my time.

That is where I am seeking clarity.  What do I want to be doing with my one wild and precious life?

Where should I be putting my energies? What do I have to give? What do I want to be doing with my time?

In the current issue of Orion Magazine, the environmental writer Paul Kingsnorth asks this question too, and provides some answers that I find useful as pointers for myself.

After discussing how likely it is that we are on the cusp of civilizational and ecological collapse, he asks, “what, at this moment in history, would not be a waste of my time?”

His answers are fivefold: 1) Withdraw; 2) Preserve nonhuman life; 3) Insist that nature has a value beyond human utility, and proclaim this loudly to all and sundry; 4) Build refuges; 5) Get your hands into the earth.

This sounds like tremendously good advice to me.  I am especially glad to be reassured that my current retreat into solitary, meditative reflection is not a cop-out, but a necessary stage in the life-cycle of the bodhisattva for the planet that I want to become.

“Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind.  Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you….Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction.  Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel.  All real change starts with withdrawal,” Kingsnorth says.

Preserving non-human life, and proclaiming its inherent value…well, I can try, within my sphere, but let’s face it, the very fact that I type these words on an Apple laptop with my refrigerator whirring quietly in the background means that I am part of the problem.

As Paul Kingsnorth knows and has expressed eloquently, there is nothing any one of us can do that will change the fate of the 200 species that go extinct every day on our planet.

Even if we come together collectively, it will be very hard, maybe impossible, to stop the juggernaut of climate change now.

That’s why the idea of building refuges and relearning off-the-grid skills makes a lot of sense to me.

I have a persistent vision of building a kind of hobbit-house in the side of a hill, off the grid and sheltered from the coming storms, in the company of others who share my dream of resilience.

It is not for nothing that JRR Tolkien’s classic The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are more popular than ever in these opening years of the 21^st century.

We are engaged in an epic struggle once again, faced with the spread of a Mordor-esque wasteland over the entire planet.

Will those of us who share the ethos of hobbits, elves and dwarfs be able to save the day?

Will enough of our contemporary wizards—scientists, they call themselves now—weigh in on the side of life and health rather than the oppressive bondage of the capitalist technocracy?

In Tolkien’s novel, Evil comes even to the sheltered little Shire, but is vanquished in the end by the forces of Good.

That is how the stories we like to tell each other go.  It remains to be seen whether reality, this time, will follow this “happily-ever-after” fairytale motif.

I don’t know how it will all end. But I do know that in these dark months of winter, when even the bright full moon is obscured, it feels right to be retreating within to reflect on how best to pursue the struggle in the coming years.