How One Woman Gained a New Perspective
And keeps on earth-skooling.
This is Janet Westervelt. She is standing in the doorway of her skoolie, named “Perspective.”
The Skoolie
By 2018 Janet had been a Montessori teacher and school administrator for 30 years, mostly in the Atlanta, Georgia area. She had been engaged in caretaking her elderly father.
“So many women get tied up with taking care of so many people all the time,” she said to me. “I hadn’t seen much of this country, and I decided, I’m going to travel.”
In late 2018, newly retired, she purchased a used mini-bus from a daycare that was going out of business, and began to build it out. By early 2019 she took her first cross-country trip. That journey was followed by another long trip in August of that year.
Something changed for Janet.
Earth-Skooling
Janet’s soul-work is environmental education. She has been director of Soque River Watershed Association, outreach manager of Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, Sierra Club leader, Adopt-a-Stream teacher, and board member of Georgia ForestWatch.
That’s how I met her. I spoke at Georgia ForestWatch’s 19th-annual fall retreat on Lake Allatoona last October. Janet was there, leading hikes and demonstrating sun-prints and building fires and arranging food.1
“So many people don’t understand how critical this planet is,” she said.
Janet brought her Perspective with her to the gathering, and I got a tour.
Perspective
Perspective was not the name Janet first gave the skoolie. She named it “Taking Time,” a reminder that she was finally taking time for herself. But somewhere along the way, as she rolled through places she had never seen, completely alone, camping on national-forest and BLM land, her perspective changed. “I’ve always been a workaholic,” she told me. “Now I’m a lot more relaxed, more appreciative, more grateful. Life is good.”
Janet talks about seeing things from different perspectives. Looking up is different from looking around or looking back.
About berry-picking she wrote:
Picking berries is a lot like life! Change your perspective just a little and a whole new set of possibilities become apparent. Then you can enjoy the fruit of your labor.
As an environmentalist Janet knows that there are always different perspectives. A fracking company has one, but the citizens who live in fracking hell, surrounded by blasted land, their well-water polluted, have another. Your understanding of the world depends on your perspective. Janet lobbies for a “sane and balanced perspective.”
Then there’s the idea of being able to put things in perspective. If a quarter isn’t placed next to an aster bloom for a nature photo, how will you know how big the flower is? An old-growth tree may be gigantic, but how will you know without some other object—a person, for example—that puts the tree’s size in perspective.
Shatner the Star-Trekker
When William Shatner went into space in 2021, at 90 years of age, he had a life-changing experience. Space offered Shatner a different perspective. He was beset, in his words, with the deepest grief he had ever experienced.
“I understood, in the clearest possible way, that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting so starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.
This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realized that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside. I did my share in popularizing the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is and will stay our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable."
Women On Board
The movement toward “tiny living” attracts many people, but I’ve noticed in the past decade that women are especially drawn to it. I’ve been fascinated with the urge of women toward van life.
Tiny living gives women the chance to do things that our mothers and grandmothers were not allowed to do.
It gives us a chance to be independent.
It gives us a way to express our freedom.
We get to control where we want to go.
Claiming our own space is empowering.
It gets us closer to nature.
The minimalism helps us think about what’s really important in life.
It helps us change our perspective.
It’s important here to know that Janet is single. A divorcee, she is mom to a grown son who lives about an hour away.
Life List
At the rear of Janet’s bus is a map of the U.S. It’s made of magnets. As Janet visits a state, she adds that state’s magnet. The only states left for her to cover are the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes.
I also noticed, while I was at the back of the bus, a hitchhiker. A tiny spider was busily constructing a web. I was thinking that spider could not have chosen a more perfect home to build her web.
If you look closely you can see the spider’s reflection in the window.
And, y’all, I know that this endeavor involves fossil fuel usage, which I am loathe to promote. Of course, of course. But there’s something very intriguing about women and freedom, about women and nature.
The Dashboard
By far my favorite image of Janet’s Perspective was her dashboard, a shrine to the earth that defines the why and the where for her.
How is slowly, mindfully, gratefully.
One Last Note
Soon after she retired, Janet signed up for a Vision Board class that she credits with putting the gears in motion for her van life. “So much of what I had on that board has come true,” she said. “For example, on it was a photo of Arches National Park.” A year later she was there.
She highly recommends that anyone create a Vision Board. “It’s forward-moving,” she said. “It puts ideas out to the universe so that they can come back to you.”
When I googled it, lots of hits come up. Here is one.
Janet allowed me to share her original Vision Board with you.
The mission of Georgia ForestWatch is “proactive involvement in the management of Georgia’s national forests.”
This past autumn, at 71, I completed a bucket list solo road trip adventure to visit California's nine national parks in my Nissan Rogue, outfitted for van camping. It didn't all go as planned, but that's part of the adventure, right? Letting go of attachment to outcome. It was fabulous.
Janet is one special person...enjoyed reading this :)