Voluntary Simplicity

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.

Jim McGuinness

Originally posted by Times News Kingport, September 24, 2006

In 2000, Sam Jones was the epitome of corporate success. A computer programmer and helpdesk manager in Columbus, Ohio, the mother of four daughters had nearly everything she could want in her professional career. The only thing lacking was a sense of fulfillment.

“It wasn’t a midlife crisis,” said Jones, who now lives in Harmony, in Washington County, Tenn. “It was awareness that I’d worked hard and had all the accoutrements of being successful – the big house, the big car, the furniture. But for some reason, I wasn’t happy.”

Jones vowed to make changes in her life. Then, in the middle of some soul searching, she found out about a course called Voluntary Simplicity that was being offered at a local church. The course was geared toward people with a desire for a slower-paced life, thus giving them more time to spend on personal relationships, connecting with nature and the pursuit of non-monetary goals. Since those were the very things Jones was looking for, she signed up.

At the end of the course’s eight weeks, she had completely bought into the notion of voluntary simplicity (also known as simple living).

“I finally had a name for the kind of lifestyle I wanted to live,” she said. “It gave me a real good foundation to start a new life on.”

In January 2004, Jones and her husband, Michael, took the idea a step further by founding the Voluntary Simplicity Group of East Tennessee. The group meets at 7 p.m. on the second and third Thursday of each month at Holston Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Gray, offering courses on a number of topics pertaining to simple living.

“The foundation is to figure out how much is enough,” Jones said. “How much is enough energy, enough time, enough money – all of those things. And when you can figure that out, I guess you can say your life is simple.”

The next course, titled “Exploring Deep Ecology,” will be held for nine sessions beginning Sept. 28. Focused on the Green philosophy, its goal is to help people understand their personal role in preserving the Earth’s resources.

While a workbook is used, none of the courses is “taught” in the traditional sense. Each meeting has a facilitator responsible for keeping the conversation on topic. Everything is otherwise done by consensus. In addition to talking about various aspects of simple living, the group might go on daytrips, watch documentaries or visit the homes of various group members. They’ve also formed a food co-op.

Deep Ecology is the flagship program of Northwest Earth Institute, an Earth-centered volunteer group that seeks to motivate individuals and organizations to protect the Earth. Based in Portland, Ore., the group has developed a series of programs in which small groups of community people meet to examine personal values and habits, engage in stimulating discussion and make personal changes if desired.

Among those courses is Voluntary Simplicity, an eight-session program that addresses the distractions that keep us from caring for ourselves, our relationships and our environment.

Changes can be small, such as starting a garden or getting excessive clothing out of your closet, or larger, such as embracing solar energy in your home.

“The reasons that people come into the course are all over the ballpark,” said Dick Roy, who co-founded NWEI with his wife, Jeanne. “Thousands of people have gone through the course, in general, because life is complicated. They want to slow things down.”

A Harvard Law School graduate, Roy practiced corporate law in Oregon from 1970 to 1993. Meanwhile, his wife worked as an activist on air quality and solid waste issues. In October 1993, he resigned his job to join her as a full-time volunteer.

Their early objective was to take Earth-centered programs into mainstream workplaces where people would meet for noontime discussions.

“We wanted to demonstrate that the workplace could be a place where people meet with a sense of purpose and have meaningful discussions,” Roy said.

As the course began to spread throughout the state, local groups were soon meeting outside the workplace. The NWEI now produces courses on Voluntary Simplicity, Deep Ecology and four other discussion topics: Choices for Sustainable Living, Discovering a Sense of Place, Globalization and Healthy Children/Healthy Planet.

One of the goals of the NWEI courses is to build small communities of people that emphasize human relationships – something Roy believes has become lost in today’s high-tech world.

“The average 18-year-old now spends eight-and-a-half hours a day interfacing with an electronic device,” Roy said. “That’s eight-and-a-half hours that otherwise would have been used in some other way. In general, the electronic world is very isolating. It alienates us from other humans, and it alienates us from the natural world.”

The idea of voluntary simplicity is hardly new. The book “Voluntary Simplictiy,” written by Duane Elgin, was originally copyrighted in 1981. While its subtitle, “Toward a Way of Life That is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich,” suggests toning down consumer spending, Jones says the concept extends further.

“I really thought, when I took the voluntary simplicity course in Columbus, it was all about being frugal,” Jones said. “That is the core of a simple lifestyle, but it’s so much more than that. It’s not about clipping coupons.”

In the case of Jones and her husband, simplicity includes everything from hanging their wash on a clothesline (they don’t have a dryer) to heating their house with wood. They also grow most of their food in their garden, do a lot of canning and preserving, and make their own bread. The couple recently got an eight-panel solar cooker that works as alternative to a regular stove.

“In my daily life, I’m very aware of energy,” Jones said. “We do many things because of the environment and our concerns about the lack of oil. But it also gives us a sense of satisfaction that we are able to be self-sufficient in some small way.”

Group member Jim Small is also energy-conscious. He and his wife, Anne, moved into their current home in Church Hill after relocating from upstate New York in January 2002.

They are partners in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Green Power Switch, a program that promotes renewable energy. The Smalls have 30 123-watt solar panels on the roof of their house that enables them to generate electricity that they sell to the TVA, which in turn sells electricity back to them.

“We planned when we moved here to do a number of different things,” Small said. “One was what kind of energy we could produce ourselves.”

Small, who has been involved in voluntary simplicity since the early ’90s, recently took delivery on a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle, a small, all-electric pickup truck capable of speeds of up to 25 miles. Restricted for use on roads with speed limits of 35 miles or less, the vehicle enables the Smalls to do their local shopping and errands without using gasoline.

“We just use electricity, which we make,” Small said. “We can drive all the way to Kingsport without using an internal-combustion automobile.”

Kingsport resident Sharon Brown joined the group two years ago as a means of finding better ways of using her time and spending her money.

Brown says she feels the impact in how she approaches shopping.

“Now I shop more purposefully,” she said. “I don’t go shopping unless I have a specific reason.”

Since joining the group, Brown says she’s also cut back on watching TV. Besides giving her more time to do other things, the move has enabled her to save money.

“My cable bill kept creeping up, and I thought, ‘This is crazy,’” Brown said. “So I cut back to basic cable which is less than $10 a month. I’m saving $500 a year.”

Group member George Cross lives in Kingsport with his wife and two teenaged sons. A geochemical engineer, he relocated to the area from southern California 12 years ago.

“We came here to be in this environment,” Cross said. “We like the natural beauty, the smaller population and the slower setting.”

While relocating helped Cross decelerate his life, he’s been slower to embrace the simple living concept than most other group members.

“My life is quite hectic now,” Cross said. “I’m probably the opposite of simple living. I admire some of the people in that class because they’ve made conscious choices to simplify their lives. I like learning some of those concepts. The more I learn about it, the more I see myself going in that direction in the future.”