Intro Path Less Taken

Over thirty years ago, islander Joe Symons began writing The Path Less Taken, found in entirety here: https://doebay.net/cpupdate/pathlessibook.pdf —a series of essays exploring growth, limits, and what it means to care for a place like the San Juan Islands. I’m Robin, and I’ve taken up the torch to carry Island Stewards into the future. As we revisit Joe’s work, I’ll be sharing my own reflections and responses to the titled sections—released weekly alongside prompts for thought and discussion. If these essays spark your own stories, questions, or creative writing, I’d love to hear them. You can reply directly or email connect@islandstewards.org your thoughts to be part of the ongoing conversation. 

Foreword

When I found Orcas, it wasn’t by plan. It was after years of being told my body had gone too far—my immune system building walls instead of bridges, my organs slipping beyond measure. Life before that had been a sort of tragic comedy, the kind where you find yourself both the punchline and the survivor.

I left the red dust and harsh light of the desert, driving toward the ocean I’ve always held dear. First the gray sandy edges of Coronado Island, then the cliffs of Big Sur, then the unseasonable rains of the Oregon Coast. What began as a trip toward rest became a slow return to life. I took the ferry into the mist, feeling the drama of it—as if I were arriving at a place to die. Instead, I arrived at a place that let me live.

Orcas greeted me the way only a small island can—through chance invitations, music spilling from old buildings, roasted vegetables shared among strangers, stories told in the kind of warmth that asks nothing in return. I found my way to a house half-swallowed by the woods, where beneath the layers of decay and debris waited a forgotten garden—rare plants, notebooks, and laminated notes tucked into rootballs, left by someone who once believed in healing through gentleness.

Then the pandemic came, and when the world fell quiet, I was still here—alive, but unsure how to belong to a community that needed more strength and certainty than my body allowed. Eventually, I found my way to Joe Symons’ garden house and, through it, into the legacy of Island Stewards.

When Joe began this work, he was looking ahead—trying to understand how the choices made in his time would shape the ground beneath ours. His foresight gave me, and many others, a place to stand. What he built was not just policy or argument, but steadiness itself. In his questions, he made room for the kind of quiet that allows a person to think, to learn, to feel safe enough to notice what’s real.

I’ve learned that no amount of healing can replace the need to grow and be taught in a place where the nervous system can rest. Joe created such a place. His patience, and his willingness to keep asking what the land could hold, have made that calm possible.

The world moves faster now, but the lesson remains: what’s built from stillness endures. Joe’s essays remind us that care and attention—given over years—can make a place strong enough to hold new generations as they learn how to live well within it.

Prompt: The question now is whether we can still make space for that steadiness
in ourselves, in our governance, and in our daily lives. What would it take for you to feel at home in the pace of your own community? 

Introduction

When Joe wrote about slaying the dragon, he was describing the courage it takes to question what you’ve been taught to accept. His dragon was cultural—an inherited pattern that rewarded progress without asking what it cost.

For me, the beast has a different name: the wolf. It lives in my body, an illness that turns the immune system inward until it mistakes life for threat.

Lupus, they call it—the wolf that devours its own strength. I’ve learned that you don’t defeat it by force. You listen. You adapt. You let it teach you what balance requires.

What Joe named in culture, I have met in biology. Both are forms of overgrowth—systems so driven to survive that they forget how to rest. The dragon and the wolf are kin: they appear when a world forgets its limits.

Joe wrote to help people see their place in a living system. I write from within that system, feeling both its weight and its beauty. His words gave shape to a truth I’ve had to learn through the body—that healing and stewardship are the same work.

Each essay in this collection invites a kind of seeing that begins inside. The goal isn’t agreement; it’s awareness. To notice what you’ve inherited, to recognize what you’ve absorbed without consent, and to remember that the act of paying attention is still the most radical form of participation there is.

This is not a new battle, just a quieter one. Joe faced his dragon; I live with my wolf. Both ask the same thing: to stay awake, to stay kind, and to keep tending what’s worth saving.

Prompt: How do we balance progress with peace? How do we define “enough” in a system that has forgotten how to stop? What limits have you learned to respect—personally, locally, or globally? And what happens when we don’t? 

Excerpts Below from The Path Less Taken, found in entirety here:

https://doebay.net/cpupdate/pathlessibook.pdf

Foreward by Joe 

My purpose in assembling the essays in this book is to give the reader a glimpse into my passion for nudging the San Juan County archipelago into a refreshingly updated ecosystem of stewardship, wisdom, harmony and sustainability. While I started on the writing path in the first few years of the 1990’s, the roots for my passion were developing in the late 1960’s when I first came to Orcas Island. By 1992 my psyche had been fully integrated into the soil, mixing and blending with all manner of nutrients, material and spiritual. Two data points stand out. First, during the 20 years from 1970 to 1990, the population of the county, and proportionally of Orcas, had tripled. Second, in a move I hope he doesn’t regret, my neighbor, at the time a member of the governing body of San Juan County (at the time it was called the BOCC; today it is the CC), asked me if I would chair the Orcas committee to rewrite the county’s Comprehensive Plan (CP).

I said, not knowing any more about what I was getting in to than I did when I became a parent, yes.

I had no idea what a CP was. I’d never read one. I’m not sure I even knew they existed, certainly not what they meant, did, or implied. No one else on the committees that were formed did either.

I have been blessed, and cursed perhaps, with a surprisingly sensitive bullshit detector. The same might also be said about my willingness to be an information wolverine, digging into the underbrush for some form of truth. In our first meeting, I recall asking the planners who were leading the CP show what the buildout population for SJC was. They didn’t know. I asked them to find out. They demurred.

Hmmmm. That seems odd. The BS detector went off.

The essays that follow riff off of that failure to pass the smell test. 

Introduction by Joe

There may be a fair amount of duplication in these essays, as I try to expose the dragon by looking at various body parts, hoping that you, the reader, will see an entry point and ask yourself how brave you are feeling, how sharp your sword (of truth) is, whether you gain an insight into how to slay this beast. The beast you are to slay lies within you. The dragon is one placed in you by the culture. To slay the dragon is to awaken to a new, deeper, richer, more nuanced, more complicated, more subtle, indeed harder to fathom and harder to navigate, reality about yourself and your place. Your place in the culture, your place in time and space (perhaps in the San Juans, tho it need not be). You are your own dragon-slayer in a culture that does not encourage this. Indeed, it frowns on it. You will have to approach this slaying stuff with an open heart and an open mind. You can’t actually hurt yourself. The worst that can happen is that you may feel you’ve wasted your time. Truly I hope that does not happen, as my purpose is not to get you to see what I see, but to get you to see, deeply and freshly and personally, what you see, unencumbered by a cultural set of truths and presumptions and rules that serve, well, generally, now, in 2017, capitalism, which itself is a product of a deep self-destructive malady which (here’s where you’ll either read on or throw this away in disgust) goes by the general term “Western Civilization”. Exhibit A in the defense of my argument for this apparently outrageous assertion is the essential arc, denied by some, but more and more accepted as an unsolved “problem”, inherent in the Anthropocene; specifically, the creation by our species of a Mass Extinction Event.