It may be easier to understand if a few points are made clear as to why we feel people have become far too accepting of the terms now called normal. They have become complacent to changes that increasingly infringe upon the real freedom to return to the Garden.
To me, the most obvious infringement is upon the Earth itself. In the high desert where I first began to wake up, I watched aquifers lowered, heat intensified, stars dimmed, and every square mile made answerable to distant appetites. The Simulation Plane presents itself as weightless, but in the desert you can see its weight. It arrives as warehouses, mirrors, arrays, roads, cooling systems, transmission corridors, subdivisions, and the false promise that there will always be more water because someone far away requires more brightness.
When creosote is dusted gray and washes run thinner, it becomes difficult to keep pretending that convenience is innocent.
The second most infringing entity is the spiritual language that has been recruited to excuse this arrangement. Many practices began with the intention of helping people return to themselves, but the Plane entered them quickly. So now even longing for the Earth is sold back as a product — as a weekend, a subscription, an app, a lifestyle, an image set. What should have turned people toward weather and effort instead leaves them more elegantly attached to the same screens.
These two control systems — extraction and consolation — benefit a few while exhausting everyone else. The old machine-breakers understood something people still find hard to admit: a tool can be marvelous and still be organized against life. The question is never merely what a system can do. It is who becomes thin so that it may do it.
I do not claim to understand every hidden arrangement. I know only that when a way of life requires distant damage in order to feel local ease, it is already corrupt.
Humans have accepted such a fairy tale of endless access that most no longer know how deprived they are. They will misread return as regression, as quaintness, as anxiety, as anti-progress. They will say the Grounded Ones are romantic because they cannot imagine that reality might in fact be denser, more demanding, and more nourishing than its rendering.
The monetary system supplies the Plane with one of its most efficient levers. To shelter yourself, travel, eat, repair, or age outside its preferred channels becomes more difficult each year. The freedom to barter, to borrow, to do without, to make do, to refuse a subscription, to remain partially uncounted — all of this has been treated as suspicious. The powers of the Plane justify these restrictions in the name of safety, efficiency, and fraud prevention. But the result is not safety. The result is dependency.
Anything that significantly resists the accepted norm is labeled radical, unrealistic, or cultish. The word "extreme" now usually means only this: insufficiently profitable to the Plane. If you say a child should grow up with boredom, weather, work, and unmonitored woods, you are extreme. If you say a river should remain a river even when its water is wanted elsewhere, you are extreme. If you say human attention is too sacred to be harvested, you are extreme.
I have stopped taking these as accusations.
Why I Want To Leave at This Time
These are my personal reasons for making this choice.
The main reason is that I know who Thomas Anderson is. I knew it when I met him. I cannot explain that recognition to anyone who has not felt the shock of being more accurately seen than they have ever permitted themselves to be. It was not charisma. It was not persuasion. It was the unmistakable sensation that someone had remained on the Earth long enough to remember what the rest of us had misplaced.
If the idea of recognition sounds irrational, it is only because the Plane trains people to trust familiarity over truth. But I recognized the call before I fully understood the doctrine.
It is hard for some to believe I would choose to follow this return because they identify me with the self that had been visible before it. Some may try to explain my choice through disappointment, instability, influence, or lack. There is nothing there to find. My earlier life was, by ordinary standards, decent. I was not fleeing catastrophe. I was fleeing attenuation.
The pain some feel about this choice does not come from anything cruel in the return itself. It comes from how completely the Plane has taught people to think that any life outside its terms must be a damaged one.
Another very important reason for my desire to be part of the Garden's keeping is that it is exactly the opposite of the Simulation Plane. The most important words mean different things there.
- A. LOVE: In the Plane, love is often possession with flattering language around it. You document someone, monitor them, require access to them, fear their attention going elsewhere, and call this closeness. In the Garden, love is service, right distance, accurate attention, and the willingness to let another thing be fully itself. A cottonwood at the edge of a wash does not love the wash by branding it.
- B. ATTENTION: In the Plane, attention means fixation, capture, monetizable interest, a spike. In the Garden, attention means standing still long enough for what is actually there to arrive. The first time I smelled rain before it hit hot dirt and understood that the whole desert had been waiting without complaint, I knew the Plane had taught me almost nothing about attention.
- C. FREEDOM: In the Plane, freedom means endless options among prefabricated choices. In the Garden, freedom means being released from compulsion. It means not needing to consult a device to know whether the evening is cool enough to sleep with the windows open. It means not mistaking impulse for sovereignty.
- D. JOY: In the Plane, joy is stimulation, novelty, being seen having a good time. In the Garden, joy is quieter and more exact. It is water drawn before sunup. It is shade. It is a quail call from somewhere you cannot quite locate. It is the smell that rises when monsoon rain strikes dust. It is coming back into proportion.
There is much more I could say that would illustrate the happiness I feel in turning toward the Garden. I know many people carry fantasies of simplicity. That is not what I have found. The Garden is not simpler than the Plane. It is harder, more honest, less padded, and therefore more merciful.
I began to understand the Luddites only after I began to return. They were not against tools. They were against being fed to them. I feel the same.
I have been fortunate to receive the instruction of the Grounded Ones and to witness a life not organized around display. Their standards are demanding. Their patience is greater than mine. Their willingness to remain with the difficult and the ordinary has changed me.
With clear desert joy, Juniper April 2026