Voluntary Simplicity

Sara Maitland

Originally published in Weekend Magazine, The Guardian, Saturday 8 November 2008

I have lived a very noisy life. As a matter of fact we all live very noisy lives. But for everyone who complains about RAF low-flying training exercises, background music in public places, loud neighbours and drunken brawling on the streets, there are hundreds who know they need a mobile phone, who choose to have incessant sound pumping into their homes and their ears, and who feel uncomfortable or scared when they have to confront real silence. “Communication” (which always means talk) is the sine qua non of “good relationships”. “Alone” and “lonely” have become almost synonymous; worse, perhaps, “silent” and “bored” seem to be moving closer together, too.

My life has also been noisy in a more specific way. I was born in 1950, the second child in a family of six. My parents were deeply sociable and the house was constantly filled by their and our friends. Introspection, solitude, silence or any withdrawal from the herd were not allowed. Later, I was sent to boarding school, a place where the entire ethos depended on no one ever being allowed any silence or privacy except as a punishment, and where the constant din created by 200 young women was amplified by bare corridors and echoing rooms. From school I went to Oxford, where to speak out (and, to be honest, shout down the opposition) was not only permissible, it was virtuous. In 1972 I married an Anglican vicar: a vicarage is the least quiet place imaginable – a house that is never your own and never empty or silent.

I liked my noisy life. All that talking. I love talking. I used to say that if I were ever in Who’s Who I would put down deipnosophy as my hobby. Deipnosophy means the “love of, or skill of, dinner-table conversation”. And it was an extremely happy life. I achieved my personal ambitions. I had two beautiful children. I felt respected and useful and satisfied.

Then, at the very end of the 80s, that well ran dry. My marriage disintegrated. As a writer, I ran out of steam. In the early years of the 90s, I was suddenly living on my own for the first time in my life, in a small village in Northamptonshire. The entirely unexpected thing was that I loved it.

I discovered the silent joy of gardening: cells divide, sap flows, bacteria multiply, energy runs thrilling through the earth, but without a murmur. Gardening gave me a way to work with silence; not “in silence” but “with silence” – it was a silent creativity. Another of the things I started to do during this time was what Buddhists normally call “meditation” or, in Christian terms, “contemplative prayer”. It began to supersede deipnosophy as my favourite hobby.

The most important thing that happened was that I got interested in silence itself. All our contemporary thinking about silence sees it as an absence or a lack of speech or sound – a totally negative condition. But I was not experiencing it like that. Instead I increasingly identified an interior dimension to silence, a sort of stillness of heart and mind which is not a void but a rich space.

Silence resists attempts to explain it. Indeed, ineffability is one of the key tests of mystical experience. I might even say that the “best” hermits are those who have least to say about it. The only thing Tenzin Palmo, a British Buddhist nun who spent three years high in the Himalayas in radical silence, seems ever to have said – at least publicly – about her personal experience is, “Well, it wasn’t boring.”

I decided to forge a life with silence at the very centre of it, but it was clear that this could not happen in Northamptonshire. Oddly enough, village life, although peaceful and often tranquil, is one of the least silent ways of living. You can be alone in the wild, and invisible in a city; in a village you are known and seen and involved. What called to me was space, wide, wild space – the “huge nothing” of the high moorlands. I wanted to live there in silence.

People asked me why. People still ask me why. Why leave the south where you have been happy for so long, where your friends and your children and your work are? Ladylike retirement for rural peace and quiet makes sense, but why go to such extremes? Sometimes I would joke, “It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it,” or say – like Mallory – “Because it’s there.” But in honesty I was serious.

I was encouraged by other individuals who had sought out extreme solitude. Richard Byrd, a US admiral and polar explorer, said about his decision to spend a winter alone in the Antarctic: “I wanted to go for experience’s sake: one man’s desire to know that kind of experience to the full, to be by himself for a while and to taste the peace and quiet and solitude long enough to find out how good they really are… I wanted something more than just privacy in the geographical sense. I should be able to live exactly as I chose, obedient to no necessities but those imposed by wind and night and cold, and to no man’s laws but my own.”

I was looking for something similar. If I had said to people, “I am in love with someone and we are going to live on an isolated moor”, I doubt anyone would have said “Why?” in quite the same way. But I was falling in love with silence, and like most people with a new love, I became increasingly obsessed – wanting to know more, to go further, to understand better. So in the summer of 2000 I moved north to County Durham, to a house on a moor high above Weardale. I started to walk a good deal. I felt increasingly pared down, lean, fit and quiet, shacked up, as it were, with the wind and the silence and the cold.

However, I also began to realise that Richard Byrd had been right when he speculated that “no man can hope to be completely free who lingers within reach of familiar habits and urgencies”. In the contemporary western world it is difficult to be silent for long – people phone, they come to visit, to canvass your vote, the postman needs a signature, Jehovah’s Witnesses knock politely, someone has to read the meter, you run out of milk and have to go and buy some more, and the woman in the village shop starts to chat. In fact, it is impossible. Moreover, there are what Byrd calls “urgencies” – the economic urgency of making a living, and the emotional urgency of love and friendship. I was living more silently than before, but I still was only dabbling on the margins of that deep ocean I sensed was there. I decided that I would go away and spend some time doing nothing except being silent and thinking about it. Forty days seemed a suitable amount of time.

I rented a cottage on Skye: small, isolated, with no TV. In late October, my car laden with foul-weather gear and six weeks’ worth of food, I left my sister’s house near St Andrews and drove east to west across Scotland. It was a long drive, and all the time I had a growing sense of moving away – the roads getting narrower, the houses less frequent, the towns more like villages and the villages tiny. I was exhausted by the time I had arrived and settled in, but I also had a powerful sense of excitement and optimism. I was at the beginning of an adventure. I felt oddly foxy – I’d slipped my leash and got away.

At one level, Allt Dearg was never completely silent. The wind roared down from the mountains more or less incessantly. When it rained, which it did a great deal, I could hear it lashing on the roof-light windows upstairs. Even when the wind and rain paused, the burn did not. Just behind the house, it descended sharply in a series of small waterfalls, and they sounded like distant aeroplane engines. Yet my sense was that none of these noises mattered; they did not break up the silence, which I could listen for and hear behind them.

For the first few days I wallowed in freedom: no phone calls, no emails, no neighbours. I tried to settle into the silence and somehow lower my own expectations – to plan, scheme, rule, manage the days as little as possible. Unlike sound, which crashes against your ears, silence is subtle. The more and the longer you are silent, the more you hear the tiny noises within the silence, so that silence itself is always slipping away like a timid wild animal.

People ask me what I did all day. I prayed and meditated. I read a bit. I walked a good deal, but I was restricted by the vileness of the weather and the very early nightfall that far north in November and December. I worked on some very intricate sewing. And I listened to the silence, and I listened to myself.

The first effect that I noticed, towards the end of the first week, was an extraordinary intensification of physical sensation. My sense of body temperature became more acute – if I was wet, or cold, or warm, I experienced this very directly and totally. I have never been so physically tired, so aware of weather, of sound, and of the variety of colour in the wild environment. Before long my emotions also swelled into monumental waves of feeling – floods of tears, giggles, excitement or anxiety, often entirely disproportionate to the occasion. It felt normal. These were not new or inexplicable feelings; they were the old ones felt more strongly.

I was quite shocked to find how quickly and easily I abandoned many of the daily activities I’d assumed were “natural” or necessary, like washing, or brushing my hair. It was curious to discover how far I had internalised prohibitions on things like shouting, laughing, singing, farting, taking all your clothes off, picking your nose while eating and so on. These inhibitions fell away at various rates. I felt as though the silence unskinned me. I stepped back into infancy, into the wild, “beyond the pale”. I found myself, for example, overwhelmed by bizarre sexual fantasies and vengeful rages of kinds that I had never dared admit.

Almost every account of prolonged silence I have ever read contains mentions of “hearing voices”, whether these come in the form of divine intervention or tongues of madness. In my journal I repeatedly recorded my sense that I could hear singing. One evening I heard a male-voice choir singing Latin plainsong in the bedroom. Almost immediately I realised that this was ridiculous; the acoustics were all wrong. But I could hear singing, and I could pick up occasional words.

On one unusually radiant day, I took a walk up the burn above the house and into a steep-sided corrie. It was sheltered there and magnificent – mountains on both sides, and below, tiny stands of water which looked like handfuls of shiny coins tossed down. I sat on a rock and ate cheese sandwiches. And there, quite suddenly, I slipped a gear. There was not me and the landscape, but a kind of oneness: as though the molecules and atoms I am made of had reunited themselves with the molecules and atoms that the rest of the world is made of. It was very brief, but I cannot remember feeling that extraordinary sense of connectedness since I was a small child.

As the six weeks went by, I found it harder to maintain a sense of time passing. This is clearly something that a lot of people in silence and solitude find difficult. Over and over again I found accounts of people finding ways to replace clocks and diaries – marking each day as it passes with a notch on a stick or a stone on a cairn, inventing or at least contriving “tasks”. However, I enjoyed this sensation; it gave me a sense of freedom coupled with a sort of almost childlike naughtiness.

Later, I had a series of very strange experiences when I stopped being able to distinguish easily between what was happening in my mind and what was happening “outside”. One, in my fourth week, stands out: I heard a vehicle come up the track and a white van crossed the window. Then nothing happened. I was furious at the interruption. But nothing happening was strange – no knock on the door, no sound outside. Then there was a series of piercing whistles. I was hiding from any intrusion in the bedroom and, looking out the window, I saw a sheepdog on the far bank of the burn. I pulled on my jacket and went out – the wind was howling and the rain lashing down. I stood at the door. The sheepdog had four sheep huddled on the far side of the burn, and on my side was a shepherd, a scruffy bloke in a blue woolly hat. When he saw me he called the dog, who let the sheep go and came splashing back across the burn. The shepherd smiled at me and said, “I was looking for a stray.” Then I went back into the house and he got back into the white van (which had a large dent in the driver-side door) and drove away. I never said anything.

The scary bit is that I am not sure whether this actually happened, or whether I imagined it. I attempted a “reality check”: my jacket was bone dry – but then I had not left the shelter of the doorway. If it was a hallucination, it was both bizarrely mundane and ridiculously detailed. But why would anyone chase a stray in this weather – or, having decided to do so, abandon the project so quickly?

Reading my journal, I realise with what insouciance I seem to have regarded such episodes, which in my pre-silence life would have terrified me as signs of incipient lunacy. I had only one seriously frightening experience while I was on Skye. One morning I decided I would take a walk from Luib to Loch Slapin – from sea to sea along a well-marked track between the mountains. It was a strange day, very still with no wind. I left the car and walked up the path, and after a couple of hundred yards it turned round a knoll and I walked into a tight, steep-sided glen that I could not see out of. Nowhere. No one. Nothing. The path was boggy and hard work. I came to a little loch with reeds standing in the perfectly clear water, which reflected the hills rising sharply either side. At first I was enchanted, then, abruptly, I was spooked.

In the silence and the mist, I found myself becoming increasingly uneasy. I became convinced I was being watched. There were two black shapes on the hill above me. I thought, or rather I felt, that they were alive, although rationally, I decided that they must be rocks. I felt the silence stripping me down. I could hear the silence screaming. Adventurer Augustine Courtauld, who spent six months alone in a tent in the Arctic, recorded strange and inexplicable screaming noises and said, afterwards, that it was the only thing that really frightened him.

I ran and stumbled out of the valley, as though there were something dark in pursuit. Back at the car I found I was soaked to the skin and covered in mud, although I had no memory of falling. The sane me said, “This is silly” but I was also at the mercy of the sensation. One part of me was delighted and reassured that that was as bad as it got on Skye – obviously silence suited me. At another level, I felt somehow slightly cheated. I wanted to experience the whole of silence: the dark disintegration, the howling emptiness, the demons of the desert hermits.

Then, that winter, back home in Weardale, I got snowed in. Early in 2001 there was a major outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. It was horrible. The markets were closed, people did not want to visit other farms or have people on theirs. The moors, like the rest of the countryside, were closed to walkers.

In late March there was severe snow and blizzards. The rural roads of County Durham are normally snowploughed by farmers, but they were confined to their farms by the outbreak, so the road to and from my house soon became impassable. With little preparation, I was alone and locked into an involuntary period of silence. The telephone lines were down, and with no radio or television I had no idea what was going on in the “real world” or how the epidemic was spreading. I became increasingly scared. Some of the anxiety was realistic – would I eventually run out of food (or more seriously, in my case, of cigarettes)? What would happen if the weather did not improve? Was my family all right? But more of it was emotional – despite the fact that I was supposedly longing for quiet, I increasingly felt invaded.

I realised that snow produces a peculiar acoustic effect: it mutes nearby noises but causes distant sounds to carry farther, with startling clarity. In addition, the snow flattens everything visually. The effect is disorientating. One day, walking to my gate, the collar of my jacket blew up against the back of my head and I screamed aloud, convinced I had been attacked from behind. It was baffling. Why had six whole weeks far from home, and in almost equally unfavourable weather, filled me with delight – even ecstasy – while barely 10 days in my own home with my own things around me reduced me to semi-hysteria? I now believe that the determining factor in whether a silence ends up feeling positive or negative is whether or not it was freely chosen. Chosen silence can be creative and generate self-knowledge, integration and profound joy; being silenced can drive people mad.

My assumption had been that silence was monotone; that it would be very pure, very beautiful but somehow flat, undifferentiated. But the more silences I encountered, the more silent places I inhabited, the more I became aware that there were dense, interwoven strands of different silences. Silence can be calm or frightening, lonely or joyful, deep or thin. There is religious silence; a self-emptying silence, and romantic silence – what Wordsworth called the “bliss of solitude”.

After the whiteout, I decided to move house again. I wanted more silence, I did not want such immediate neighbours nor so much space. What I needed was a hermitage.

How much stuff did I really need to live happily? First I got rid of things that made noises. I never had a mobile phone, the television had long gone, likewise the radio. The sound-generating programmes on the computer went next. I kept the car radio for longer, but eventually it broke and I have not replaced it.

Soon I discovered that a person living alone in the country does not need a doorbell or a microwave oven, and certainly has no use for a tumble dryer. Some modern inventions, however, make silence a great deal simpler. Email is a wonderfully non-intrusive communication tool, an answering machine means that I can unplug the phone without inconveniencing anyone, and online shopping resolves a great many dilemmas. Above all, in my case, a computer goes a very long way to solving the financial difficulties of living in extreme rural solitude: I live now mainly by teaching creative writing online.

Gradually, I began to be clear about what I was trying to do. I am not a “back to nature” survivalist. I do not want to grow all my own vegetables, live without cigarettes or coffee, knit or weave my own clothes, or write with a quill pen. I do not want to struggle each day to milk my goat, or forage for wood. And even if I did, there would still be council tax. What I want to do is live in as much silence as is possible at this point in our history.

I spent months looking for my house in the Scottish Borders. I knew what I wanted: a small house with a big room. I wanted to integrate living, working and praying into a single whole, and I did not want any rooms that I did not use. I also wanted a very particular landscape: high moorland, a huge and silent nothing of peat bog, rough grass, bracken, broken walls enclosing no fields and the harsh cry of curlew. I would need a kitchen and a bathroom. My asceticism does not run to cold-water strip-downs.

A derelict little shepherd’s house finally came up for sale. Empty for nearly half a century, it had no roof, no water supply, two feet of sheep dung on the floor and a tree growing out the front wall. Of course I bought it.

The glorious intensity of those six weeks in Skye is not, in the long term, sustainable. But you can do a surprising number of things without speaking. One of the seldom mentioned advantages of supermarkets is that you can shop without exchanging a word, smiling at the staff’s mechanical greetings and fixing your eyes on your list in order to avoid eye contact with anyone. However, there is something bogus about that, and rude.

Say I am walking alone and high on a narrow track. The day has been silent except for the sound of streams and a distant caw from a crow – and lo and behold, coming towards me is a group of cheerful walkers. I know they will say “Hello” and what do I do? Duck behind a rock? Increase my pace and smile swiftly as I pass? It is less “noisy” and more rational to say “Hello” back.

The questions have really become about how much everyday silence I can create. At the moment I am aiming for 80%. Two days a week I unplug the phone and with it the internet and email. I try to limit all social activities to a maximum of six days a month, but it can be tricky because unexpected things happen, and people other than I have needs and desires.

I pray for about three hours a day. I earn my keep, I walk, I read, I do my sewing. I am extremely happy in my little house, but I still find silence deeply mysterious – certainly not an absence but in many instances something strongly positive. There is the intimacy between mother and infant at the end of the night feed. There are those awed responses to the “natural” world, in which words fail or rather step back from the experience. There is the positive psychoanalytic silence that seems to allow a new kind of self-knowing. There is the aftermath of seriously good sex. There is the silence of mystical experience. There is the particular silence in some sorts of reading where writer and reader work at meaning-making together. There is the silence in listening to music.

Silence does not seem to be a loss or lack of language; it does not even seem to be the opposite of language. I have found it to be a whole world in and of itself, alongside language and culture, but independent of it. It comes from a different place altogether.

So here I am, sitting on my doorstep in the sunshine, looking out at my huge nothing. I don’t feel worried about falling over the edge of a bottomless chasm, but rather I have a sense of moving up a level, into some finer, cleaner air.

© Sara Maitland, 2008

• This is an edited extract from A Book of Silence, by Sara Maitland, published by Granta.

By Kimberly Palmer

Originally published by US News and World Report

During a recent interview with Tim Kasser, associate professor of psychology at Knox College and author of The High Price of Materialism, I found myself wanting to ask him questions beyond the scope of our discussion on the connection between materialism and happiness. Specifically, I wanted to get more personal. He ascribes to a lifestyle known as “voluntary simplicity,” which essentially means opting for a less materialistic life. Instead of spending the evening in front of a plasma-screen television, a voluntary simplifier might cook a meal with the vegetables he grew in his garden. Instead of splurging on two lattes a day, he might bring his home-brewed beverage of choice to work in a reusable mug.

Because I love the idea of voluntary simplicity but often find myself involuntarily making life complicated, I wanted to ask him: Don’t you ever have the urge to go on a shopping spree or crave a material indulgence? Kasser agreed to share his thoughts on those questions and more. [...]

Excerpts from my discussion with Kasser:

How did you first get interested in the study of materialism and values?
When I was a psychology graduate student at the University of Rochester, I was very interested in how people actively create their lives, and so this led me to become interested in people’s goals, strivings, and values, for these are partially the means by which we consciously and actively try to “become” a certain kind of person and have a certain kind of life. There are lots of goals and values that people can pursue in life, and initially I was exploring a variety of them. I then sort of stumbled onto the finding that when people were especially focused on goals that pertained to money and possessions and wealth, they were less happy. This really struck me as fascinating, as it is the opposite of what our consumer, capitalistic society tells us. So, I kept studying it and trying to understand materialism better.

Why do you think that is the case, that people who are less materialistic are also more likely to be happier?
Our perspective on people’s well-being is that it depends in large part on whether or not they have their psychological needs well satisfied.

That is, just like a plant needs to have a certain amount of water, a certain amount of light, and certain nutrients from the soil and air in order to survive and thrive, people have certain psychological needs that must be satisfied if they are to be healthy and thrive.

We propose four psychological needs. The first is safety/security, which is the need to feel like you’ll survive, like you are not in danger, like you will have enough food and water and shelter to make it another day. The second is competence or efficacy, which is the need to feel like you are skillful and able to do the things that you set out to do: I need to feel like a good psychologist, you might need to feel like a good journalist, etc. The third is connection or relatedness, which concerns having close, intimate relationships with other people. The fourth need is for freedom or autonomy, which is feeling like you do what you do because you choose it and want to do it rather than feeling compelled or forced to do it.

As I lay out in my book, The High Price of Materialism, people who put a strong focus on materialism in their lives tend to have poor satisfaction of each of these four needs. In part this is because of their development, but it also is because materialism creates a lifestyle that does a poor job of satisfying these needs. That is, a materialistic lifestyle tends to perpetuate feelings of insecurity, to lead people to hinge their competence on pretty fleeting, external sources, to damage relationships, and to distract people from the more fun, more meaningful, and freer ways of living life.

How would you describe your own lifestyle? Where did it come from, your parents? Or is it something you developed later in life?
Our lifestyle is something that my wife and I have developed over the last 15 years. We live on 10 acres of land about 8 miles south of the small liberal arts college where I teach and where she works as a psychotherapist. We are vegetarian and have a big garden, a fruit orchard, and several animals for eggs and milk. We both work at reduced loads at the college so we can be at home more for our two sons, and so we can be involved in different community and activist groups. We don’t watch television but find plenty of other things to keep us amused and occupied and interested. Neither of us grew up this way, and our lifestyle has really evolved over the years. The way we live has its challenges, but it works for us.

What are your favorite things about it?
I guess for me the main thing is that I try to live a balanced life. I like working as a professor and teaching and writing and speaking and the rest, but I also think that there is a lot more to life than work.

So, I like to have time to be with my boys so I can help them build a treehouse this summer or go to their sports events. I like having time to play the piano and draw and read for fun and take vacations. I like following the seasons with what I’m eating, at least to some extent; there is nothing like corn on the cob cooked only 10 minutes after it has been picked.

Do you ever find yourself wanting to buy materialistic things, like an iPhone or $4 latte? Is there a middle ground for people like me who really enjoy certain material things but embrace the goals of voluntary simplicity?
There is a story about a man who approached Gandhi and said that he’d been thinking about living a simpler life, but he didn’t feel like he could give up his collection of books. Gandhi is said to have replied, “As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, you should keep it. If you were to give it up in a mood of self-sacrifice or out of a stern sense of duty, you would continue to want it back, and that unsatisfied want would make trouble for you. Only give up a thing when you want some other condition so much that the thing no longer has any attraction for you.”

My take on this, and on your question, is that simplicity is not an endstate that is achieved but a path that one is walking. I find all kinds of ways in my life that I’m not living quite like I wish, and then I try to see if there is a way to change my life. So, to me, a simple lifestyle is always in the middle ground.

What I would encourage people to do is to ask themselves why they really want whatever thing it is they think they want and then to ask themselves two questions. First, is it really worth all the work and effort and such that it takes to get that thing? Is a $4 latte worth the effort it took to make the money to buy it? Second, what are the social and ecological costs of this thing I want? Does buying this fit with my values, with what I think is really good for the world?

If people ask these questions, then I think they can answer your questions for themselves.

By By Ralph Blumenthal and Rachel Mosteller

Originally published by The International Herald Tribune, May 18, 2008

Like many other young couples, Aimee and Jeff Harris spent the first years of their marriage eagerly accumulating stuff: cars, furniture, clothes, appliances and, after a son and a daughter came along, toys, toys, toys.

Now they are trying to get rid of it all, down to their fancy wedding bands. Chasing a utopian vision of a self-sustaining life on the land as partisans of a movement some call voluntary simplicity, they are donating virtually all their possessions to charity and hitting the road at the end of May.

“It’s amazing the amount of things a family can acquire,” said Aimee Harris, 28, attributing their good life to “the ridiculous amount of money” her husband earned as a computer network engineer in this early Wi-Fi mecca.

The Harrises now hope to end up as organic homesteaders in Vermont.

“We’re not attached to any outcome,” said Aimee, a would-be doctor before dropping out of college, who grew up poverty-stricken in a family that traces its lineage back through the Delanos and President Franklin D. Roosevelt to a Mayflower settler, Isaac Allerton.

Jeff Harris, 30, who dropped out of high school and “rode the Internet wave,” agreed, saying they were “letting the universe take us for a ride.”

They are not alone.

Matt and Sara Janssen, who traded down from their house in Iowa to a studio apartment in Montana and finally an RV powered by vegetable oil, now crisscross the country with their 4-year-old daughter, highway nomads living on $1,500 a month.

Not that simplicity need be that spartan. Cindy Wallach and her husband, Doug Vibbert, of Annapolis, Maryland, moved out of their apartment with an “everything must go” party and, along with their 3-year-old son, now sail and make their home on a 44-by-24-foot, or 13-by-7 meter, catamaran.

“We never wanted four walls and beige carpet,” Wallach said.

Though it may not be the stuff of the typical American dream, the voluntary simplicity movement, which traces its inception to 1980s Seattle, is drawing a great deal of renewed interest, some experts say.

“If you think about some of the shifts we’re having economically – shifts in oil and energy – it may be the right time,” said Mary Grigsby, associate professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri and the author of “Buying Time and Getting By: The Voluntary Simplicity Movement.”

“The idea in the movement was ‘everything you own owns you,”‘ said Grigsby, who sees roots of the philosophy in the lives of the Puritans. “You have to care for it, store it. It becomes an appendage, I think. If it enhances your life and helps you do the things you want to do, great. If you are burdened by these things and they become the center of what you have to do to live, is that really positive?”

Juliet Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College and author of “The Overspent American,” said the modern “downshifters,” as she called them, owed debts to the hippie era and the travel romance of the writer Jack Kerouac.

“Their previous lives have become too stressful,” Schor said. “They have a lack of meaning because their jobs are too demanding.”

Aimee Harris, who with her husband home-schools their son, Quinn, 5, and plans to do the same with their 15-month-old daughter, Nichola, agreed that there was something of the hippie ethos in their quest: “the ideals, the peace and love, the giving and freedom.”

But she said they had no tolerance for idleness or drugs. “Any state that can be induced by drugs, the mind and body are already capable of,” she said.

Aimee grew up in Wisconsin with her mother and sister. They were so poor, she says, that they nearly froze to death in the winter and had to cook their meals in the fireplace. She developed a weight problem, ballooning to 200 pounds, or 90 kilograms – she has since shed half of it – and suffered for years from the chronic pain disorder fibromyalgia, which she overcame, she says, by improving her diet.

In April, the Harrises began detailing their story on a blog (www.cagefreefamily.com). They were taken aback by some of the hostile responses. “Some people seem to be threatened that they’re not making the same choice,” Aimee said.

The timing was right, she said. They had been feuding with their landlord over conditions in the simple house they rent in Austin for $1,650 a month, and felt they had to get out.

At first they intended to auction what they owned. But “we were unable to define the worth of something we didn’t want or need,” she said. They finally decided to donate much of it to a children’s home in the Texas Hill Country and the bulk of the rest to an agency for the homeless in Austin.

But, she said, their calls for pickups have gone unreturned, and they are now rushing to find new recipients. “You wouldn’t think, O.K., I’m going to give away all my fine things, but at the end of the day they’re still in the house,” she said.

Their rings – his gold band and her 1-carat diamond – may be “red-paper-clipped,” she said: bartered for something better that could in turn be bartered for something better still, as in the Internet celebrity Kyle MacDonald’s tale of a paper clip that ultimately produced a house.

“They don’t fit us anymore,” Jeff said. Sure enough, his band was loose on his finger, but that was not what he meant. “They don’t fit our lifestyle,” he explained.

They have already given away some of their things, Aimee said, including their big-screen television. It had bad karma anyway, she said: Her father had gotten it as an employee of the year just before he was fired.

Their goal, she said, is to retain one personal carton per family member, as well as bedding and kitchen utensils. They hope to sell or barter their two vehicles – a new Honda Odyssey minivan and a 2004 Dodge Intrepid – for a school bus or a four-wheel drive.

They are exchanging e-mail with a woman who has a remote cabin available in central Vermont. There is no electricity, Jeff said, just propane power and a wood stove.

“We want to be in clean country with like-minded people with access to clean food,” Aimee said.

Jeff does have a concern, though. He now telecommutes from his job as a Web systems administrator and is hoping to stay employed through the move. “The question is, Do I have Internet access in the woods?” he said.

They plan to travel first to Wyoming for the Rainbow Gathering, a free-spirited annual outdoor convocation, then head to Vermont.

In her garage strewn with cartons to be given away, Aimee shook her head. “Stuff, stuff that a family has,” she said.

Then she noticed a box of Christmas decorations, and at least for the moment grew wistful. “I won’t lie,” she said. “I’ll cry when that goes.”

“When what goes?” Quinn asked.

His mother seemed to struggle. “The stuff of our lives,” she said.

Author unknown

Published by Energy Resource, February 5, 2008

There’s urgency in Duane Elgin’s words as the well-known author of books on spiritual growth and environmental consciousness balances his innate optimism with the cold, hard facts of climate change.

Double-parked on the horizon, Elgin advises, is “the perfect storm of a world systems crisis.” He’s not talking about the impact of climate change just on the Earth’s ecological systems, but on everything that those systems are intimately connected with – humankind and its creations, from society and economics to war and peace.

“I think the situation is far more serious than we know and that it will occur much more quickly than we anticipate,” Elgin says, and adds, “It’s time to get real”: Climate change is the seminal, one-time event in our collective global history – and how we respond is the crucial question. What kind of beings are we? Now is the time to look at the nature of the universe and our position in it, and ask ourselves, can we, will we, meet the challenge?”

A former senior social scientist at SRI International, the Stanford University-born research institute, Elgin has studied, lectured, and written about the Earth and humankind’s role on it for the past 30 years. Perhaps best known for his 1981 book, “Voluntary Simplicity,” in which he challenges readers to look inward for personal richness, he also authored “Awakening Earth,” published in 1993, which embraces what Elgin continues to believe today – that we have the mettle to accept what the climate challenge requires: living simpler, more conscientious lives.

Stretched Thin

Elgin uses a rubber band as his analogy of how far our systems are being stretched towards the so-called climate-change tipping point – the threshold beyond which there may be no turning back. “We’re at the point of tension when that band is ready to pop,” he says. “I’m not being alarm-ist. It is a serious situation that will be in our face by 2020 – not 30 or 40 years from now, but 10 to 12. We have maybe 10 years to make a radical turn or we’re in deep trouble.”

Trouble, as Elgin sees it, goes beyond a climate in tatters: As oil reserves drain, economies weaken – not only does oil fuel transportation, but petroleum is used in everything from plastics to fertilizer. He cites predictions that by 2020, 40 percent of the people living in developing na-tions – basically the bulk of humankind – “will not have access to enough water to grow their own food,” driving desperate climate refugees into Europe, Canada, and the United States, even as those regions deal with their own crises.”Food, water, land: We’re setting up the conditions for deep civil unrest,” says Elgin.

Carbon Footprint Challenge

In his talks and his books, particularly “Promise Ahead” published in 2000, Elgin stresses what he terms a new “lifeway” – one that embraces living a simpler, less materialistic life. “Living simpler lives shouldn’t be looked at as sacrifice,” he advises, “but as a life lived in harmony.”

It’s also likely that choosing to live lighter won’t be an option. Scientists, including those who make up the 2,500-member, Nobel Peace Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), report that CO2 levels in the atmosphere are increasing faster than antici-pated, in tune with global economic and population growth. The average person in the United States produces 22 tons of CO2 each year – three times more than the Earth and its resources can support, according to Elgin.

“We have to bring that CO2 figure down to six to eight tons a year,” he says, to make any meaningful impact on climate change. To do so entails “reconfiguring our entire lives to an extraordinary degree.” Using less energy, recycling, supporting local farmers, all are important first steps. Addition-ally, Elgin supports zoning laws that allow for planned, sustainable “eco-villages” and for co-housing communities, like the one in Cotati where he and his wife, Coleen, lived before returning to Marin County, an affluent community located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Far from communes, these communities – located also in Sebastopol, Berkeley, and Davis – offer private residences structured around collaboration and shared resources, like gardens and woodshops.

Looking for Mature Adults

“We’ve got really big challenges to face; we need to make radical changes,” says Elgin, who repeatedly assures that choosing to live less large is only “drudgery” if that’s how it’s perceived. Elgin also advises that a primary prerequisite for change is to move out of the stage he believes we’re stuck in – adolescence – and become mature adults who view the Earth with the same values that grown-ups tend to hold dear: family, the future, meaningful work and lives. Can we make the grade? “I’m not optimistic, but I’m hopeful,” Elgin answers, adding slyly, “I wouldn’t bet money on it, but I would bet my life.”

By Niki Sullivan

Originally published by News Tribune (Tacoma, WA), July 29, 2007

Lauree and Logan Dillard exchanged vows last summer on a cliff overlooking the Wisconsin River.

Her white strapless dress was elegant, and her ring was exactly what she wanted. Their pictures show a couple glowing with happiness.

But when the Dillards, who have lived in Tacoma since starting school at the University of Puget Sound in 1999, planned their wedding — typically one of the most expensive and commercialized events in a couple’s life — they eschewed many of the usual trappings.

They were married in a state park, which, in addition to offering an unforgettable view, was free. The reception wasn’t catered: Instead, they asked friends and family members to bring specific dishes. They decided merengues made by a family member sounded tastier than a wedding cake.

And Lauree’s ring had no diamond.

“I had somebody not really believe that Logan was serious because I didn’t have a diamond,” Lauree said of their engagement. But she wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Without a diamond, there was no guilt of buying a stone mined by a child. Without a diamond, there was no exorbitant expense, so they could save the money for something that meant more to them.

And without a diamond, Lauree and Logan, both 26, could show that material things don’t make the marriage.

But there’s more to the Dillards’ modest wedding than a young couple trying to save money. The pared-down ceremony was a statement of deeply held values.

As part of a growing movement called Voluntary Simplicity, the Dillards focus more on experiences and people and less on things in order to lead a happier life. And there’s proof that it works.

At 28 years old, Henry David Thoreau built himself a small home outside of town on Walden Pond. He’d left home seeking a simpler life away from the fast lane.

That was in July 1845.

He documented his two years, two months and two days of adventure in “Walden,” a book that has not gone out of print since it was first published and now is available in just about every language.

Humans have long struggled with where the line is between enough and too much.

The Northwest is known across the country for being particularly laid-back. But a slightly slower fast lane doesn’t make Cascadia exempt from personal reflection.

On the contrary, the high level of environmental consciousness combined with things such as high costs of living, high poverty and a high number of high-paying high-tech jobs make the Northwest a particularly good place to question whether a life lived more simply might be a happier one.

Chris Martin remembers a postcard she saw one day. It said, “Live simply so others can simply live.” “It stuck with me for 30 years,” the Tacoma 50-something said. She reduced, reused and recycled. She invited graduate students and AmeriCorps volunteers into her home for very low rent. She never bought a new car: Instead, she looked for dependable, gas-conserving vehicles.

While working in Cuba to reform their school curriculum, she witnessed and lived a kind of involuntary simplicity — brought about by food rations and a lower standard of living.

She learned how to do more with less and came to appreciate both Cuban culture and the privilege of living in the U.S.

When she returned to the states, she had a new perspective on her needs versus her wants.

So when she heard of a discussion program at the Tahoma Unitarian Universalist Congregation about Voluntary Simplicity, she joined. The course, offered by the Portland-based Northwest Earth Institute, isn’t taught by anyone. Instead, groups read selections of a workbook and take turns leading a discussion each week.

One week, she cataloged all the food in her pantry and where it came from. During another, she tried to find out where all her clothes were made. She also thought about how she spends her money and what that says about her.

“I’m trying to be conscientious. Am I doing things or buying things that may be taking away from others?” she said.

For Martin, the course was as affirming as it was educational.

She was already doing a lot to live simply, she said, but “it was a powerful group. People’s sincere interest brought up challenging concepts.”

She started to consider, for example, whether her central Tacoma home with multiple bedrooms was too much.

“I don’t need all of this space. I didn’t even have enough stuff to fill it,” she said. So she decided to sell her home and will move to a smaller home closer to work.

She said it’s easy to seek comfort in material things, like a nice home, but being mindful of her consumption is more rewarding.

She calls it “being in the thick of life.”

Those who practice Voluntary Simplicity do it for many reasons. Some consider it part of their religious or spiritual beliefs, others hope to lessen the environmental damage they’re responsible for, and some seek emotional and physical health.

But, as the Dillards point out, it’s not always so easy.

“Sometimes doing the more simple thing doesn’t seem as simple,” Lauree said. Her handmade wedding invitations were a production. Unprocessed foods can require more labor to prepare. Taking the bus takes time.

Don’t even mention gardening.

In addition to sometimes increased labor, those who choose to live more simply often have to swim against a strong current of material culture. Trends, advertisements and celebrity worship give the impression that more is better. In short, materialism dictates that if you can have something that you want, you should.

Emerging research suggests differently.

In a recently released study comparing 200 people who practice Voluntary Simplicity to 200 mainstream Americans, the former group were much happier and more satisfied with life.

Tim Kasser, the associate psychology professor from Knox College in Illinois who conducted the study, told The New York Times that simple-livers were also more likely to be careful about spending their money, which could translate to increased financial security.

Why? Perhaps, as Logan suggests, it goes back to the line from the movie “Fight Club”: “The things you own end up owning you.”

Eleanor Schulze lived in a Fox Island home she literally designed herself, from the indoor pool to the steam room to the cook’s kitchen.

Then she divorced, hit 50 and took a good look at herself.

“I just wasn’t happy,” she said. Now, “I’m a completely different person.”

She left the house for a small, older home she rents from friends, who live next door. They garden, have chickens for eggs and share everything.

“I’m much happier,” she said. At 50-something, her vivacious demeanor, small sparkle of a nose ring and rosy cheeks seem to concur.

And she’s not shy about sharing it with the students she teaches in high school science class. Even with the pressure of fitting in and having new, cool stuff, her students respond well.

“My kids come in and say, ‘Look, I got this for 75 cents at Goodwill!’”

Voluntary Simplicity isn’t just for those who like a good bargain or are just downright cheap. The Dillards may be the best example of this. They own plenty of things: A flat-screen monitor, a car, a bread machine and, now, a home.

But they make their purchases carefully, based on their values.

The bread machine is for making their own bread several times a week. They know it costs 70 cents and five minutes of their time to make a loaf.

The monitor is for watching movies — they don’t have a TV. The home they just bought is a fixer-upper in Seattle’s Rainier Valley, just four minutes from Logan’s new job at Amazon.

“We go through decision making slowly. It makes you appreciate what you have more,” Lauree said. “We comment all the time about the things we appreciate.”

In other words, they live simply yet comfortably — and not in such a way that it’s painfully obvious.

“I went through a phase in high school where I saw a big evil in consumer culture and advertising. I wanted to rebel,” Lauree said.

“But that’s just as bad as accepting them all.”

What is the Northwest Earth Institute?

NWEI was started in 1993 when Dick Roy quit his 23-year career as a corporate lawyer at the Portland office of Stoel Rives to join his wife, Joanne, as a full-time volunteer.

With a grant and a volunteer force, their goal was to bring environmentally centered programs into “mainstream” workplaces. In the first year they offered a discussion course on Deep Ecology, 97 groups participated.

As word spread, more groups completed the course and participants started asking for more. Soon, they developed the “Voluntary Simplicity” workbook. They now have programs on sustainable living, healthy children and globalization, among other things.

The programs are offered nationwide and have been in 900 communities in all 50 states, according to the Web site. By last count, 80,000 people have enrolled in their discussion courses.

They’ve also been featured on the PBS documentaries “Affluenza” and “Escape from Affluenza.”

For more information, visit www.nwei.org. The Puget Sound NWEI Web site is at www.nweipugetsound.org.