The Man Who Quit Money (6 page)

What impressed Suelo most was that despite their extreme poverty, the people were unfailingly generous. “They just had logs to sit on, and they’d get up and offer us seats,” he says. “And they fed us. They barely had enough for their families but they made sure everywhere we went that we were fed. It just amazed me.”

A few days after his return to Grand Junction, Daniel and a friend were walking through his neighborhood. By this time the Shellabargers had moved from the rental by the train tracks to a pleasant split level in the hills. As the boys approached a gaudy mansion on a corner, they cut across its lawn. A man raced to the door and yelled at them to stay off his grass.

It made Daniel think. The people who had the least were the most willing to share. He outlined a dictum that he would believe the rest of his life: the more people have, the less they give. Similarly, generous cultures produce less waste because excess is shared, whereas stingy nations fill their landfills with leftovers.

At about the same time, his belief in the infallibility of the church took its first blow. Upon moving to Grand Junction, Dick and Laurel had started a Plymouth Brethren home Bible study, and within a few years the group had raised enough money to build a chapel on the outskirts of town. But after only a few years, the Shellabargers had a falling-out with their congregation.

“We just plain didn’t fit in,” Dick says. “They started to find fault with us.” The men in the church seemed to resent that Laurel held such a successful Bible study, even though she taught only other women. (Citing Scripture, Laurel believes it is wrong for women to teach religion to men.) “The women at Brethren were treated as inferior, as slaves,” Dick explains. After three decades, the family left the Plymouth Brethren, and joined a nondenominational evangelical church.

By this time Dick had risen to manager at the dealership, and the family was again prosperous. Pennie had married an elder in the Plymouth Brethren and given birth to the first of what would be eight children. Rick and Doug had finished high school and were living at home and enrolled at Mesa State College in Grand Junction. After a year working in a hospital, Daniel joined them there. Ron, who suffered a mild mental disability, had married and was working as a laborer.

It wasn’t until after he left home that Daniel’s probing mind truly began to loosen the foundations of his faith. He decided he wanted to be a doctor, and he applied to transfer to the University of Colorado at Boulder. His family and church disapproved. They regarded Boulder as the Gomorrah of the Rockies, a haven for cults, liberals, and loose living. They thought the move would undermine his faith. But Daniel was firm. He thought any tests to his faith would only strengthen it.

. . .

To think, we must eat.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

B
EGGING MAY BE
the most shameful act in America. It’s how we define failure: if you don’t work hard and get good grades, you’ll end up on the street, panhandling for change. Traditionally the only more degrading means of supporting yourself is prostitution, although with the advent of legally sanctioned escort services, even call girls now command more respect than beggars.

In Eastern religions, begging has a whole different meaning. Hindu holy men called
sadhus
go door-to-door with a “begging bowl” that their neighbors fill with food. Ordained monks who live like sadhus are called
sannyasis,
from the Sanskrit word for “renunciation.” For Buddhists it is the
bhikkus,
which translates as “beggars” or “ones who live by alms”; for Muslims the fakirs, which translates as “poverty”; for Sufis the dervishes, from the Persian word for “door,” as in, the person who goes from door to door. In all these cases, the renunciates travel the countryside naked, or wrapped in a simple cloth. They often wear their hair
in ropes and smear their bodies with clay and ash. They own nothing, earn no income, and survive entirely on the contributions of others.

Perhaps the most revered beggar of all time is Siddhartha Gautama. When he left his privileged Hindu home in 563 BC on the search for truth that would result in his becoming the Buddha, his only possessions were three robes, a razor, a needle, a belt, a water strainer, and a begging bowl. Giving alms was an act of exchange, not of charity. The purpose of begging was not to get food, but to humble oneself, to forgo one’s own pride and admit to being dependent on others. In doing so, the renunciate offered the community the
privilege
of giving, so that they themselves could take a small step toward nonpossession, the quest upon which the holy man had embarked. The beggar received his bread, but the giver received something as valuable—the opportunity to share. The Buddha forbade his disciples from saying “thank you” as they collected alms. To this day some monks acknowledge the exchange by saying, “May your generosity bring you peace and harmony.”

Far from being regarded as derelicts,
sannyasis
are afforded respect, as men who have renounced the material world for spiritual wisdom, which they share with the community that supports them. One notable adherent of
sannyasa
was Mohandas Gandhi, who declared, “I could not live both after the flesh and the spirit,” as he chose poverty and forsook pleasures like sex and cooked food, even salt. Westerners have long viewed such asceticism with admiration, or at least curiosity. In
The Jungle Book
Rudyard Kipling sympathetically depicts a sixty-year-old Indian civil servant who, after raising his family and succeeding in his career, “had resigned position, palace, and power, and taken up the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dresses of a Sunnyasi, or
holy man.” Even curmudgeonly Mark Twain, skeptical of American spiritualists like Brigham Young, was subdued into something like respect when he came across mystics in India in 1895. In
Following the Equator,
he wrote:

There is simply no equivalent in modern Christianity, despite the fact that Jesus himself said, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.” For centuries,
renunciation was central to the religion. In fifth-century Syria, Saint Simeon the Stylite lived for thirty-seven years atop a tiny platform on a tower, fasting and making an endless series of genuflections. In the Middle Ages, European monks known as mendicants took up voluntary begging as a means of imitating Christ and expressing faith in divine providence. But the tradition did not last into the modern era, nor make the journey to the Americas.

To be sure, monks and nuns of the Franciscan and Carmelite orders still take a vow of poverty and are supported by donors. But these contributions are not collected on the streets. Nowadays alms can be given by credit card with a simple click at
thefriars.org
. Twentieth-century Catholics like Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day and her Catholic Workers strove to bring ascetic poverty into modernity. “We must frankly admit that self-denial and sacrifice are absolutely essential to a life of prayer,” wrote Merton. But these renunciates populate only the fringe of Christianity. We can’t imagine our monks or priests begging for food at our doorsteps; our charity for them stops at the Sunday collection plate.

While Suelo is not a monk and does not claim to belong to the ranks of holy men, he draws much of his inspiration from them. After a stint in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, he briefly referred to himself as an American sadhu, and adopted a different take on begging. While his ethos prevents him from panhandling for money, he is willing to ask for food. Occasionally he goes to restaurants or bakeries and asks for leftovers. “Usually people are really nice. They are so glad they can give something. They smile. They go in the back and load up a plate. But sometimes I get, ‘Fuck off. Get out of here.’”

“Is that humiliating?” I asked.

“Sometimes it is. That’s part of the path, being able to walk away without reaction.”

When I asked why he didn’t wear a monk’s robes and ask for alms, he said that he didn’t think that religious people should receive more than anyone else. “The point is to lift everyone up in equality, to encourage people to help the bag lady or the drunk in the gutter as much as the Buddhist monk,” he told me. “It might limit my ability to get food, but that’s the concept of faith. It’s all inward. If I’m following the path of truth, then I’m not going to worry about food, and I’m not going to manipulate people into giving me food.”

The other reason he doesn’t beg a lot is that his conservative Rocky Mountain upbringing instilled a certain pride in not asking for help. “That’s been the hardest thing about this lifestyle,” he said. “I was always raised to give. More blessed to give than to receive. For the first couple of years it was really hard for me to admit that I was in need. I still find myself doing that. Someone will ask me if I’m hungry, and I’m really hungry, and I’ll say, ‘No, I’m all right.’”

Of course our society has means of delivering food to the needy that don’t require begging, primarily food stamps and nonprofit charities like soup kitchens. Suelo avoids them for the same reasons he shuns homeless shelters: the charity is not freely given. So without panhandling or the dole, how does he eat?

After our Qigong session as we sat outside the cave and watched the sun hover over the opposite cliffs, I pulled lunch from my pack. I had brought cheese and crackers and chocolate and an avocado. I watched Suelo closely. With all the talk about Jesus and ancient Hindus, I expected him to grind rice-grass seeds into flour with a mortar and pestle and then bake unleavened bread.

He revealed a clear plastic jar with an aquamarine lid that I recognized as the vessel for Skippy peanut butter. Instead of brown goop it was filled with brightly colored gemstones, red and yellow and orange and green. Crystals? He unscrewed the lid and extended the jar.

“Gummi bear?”

.  .  .

I
N ALL MY
visits with Suelo over the course of two years, he never appeared hungry or the slightest bit worried about where his next meal was coming from. Occasionally I cooked for him at my house or took him to a restaurant, but for the most part, he was the one feeding me. When I packed food up to his cave, so complete was his hospitality that I sometimes forgot to break out the grub. He had found his version of abundance.

To begin with, Suelo simply doesn’t eat as much as most Americans. On a long walk, he might eat a hunk of bread and a couple of mandarin oranges, and decline the cheese and cookies I wolfed down. He typically eats just two meals a day, and they are simple: rice, fruit, vegetables, bread, cheese. He eats some meat, but not much. In this way his diet more closely resembles that of the typical human than the typical American. Americans eat 3,800 calories per day on average, while the world average is about 2,800. Suelo’s diet puts him closer to a sub-Saharan African, who eats 2,200 calories a day.

Eating less has a long history in all religions. Moses, Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed fasted regularly as a means toward purification and humility, as did modern spiritual leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Catholics fast during Lent, Jews during Yom Kippur, Muslims during Ramadan. Mormons
are encouraged to fast the first Sunday of every month. Buddhist monks typically eat breakfast around six, lunch at noon, then only liquids for the rest of the day. Although the practice has a variety of meanings, its general purpose is to focus less on physical needs and more on the spiritual realm. Suelo has incorporated this belief into his daily life. “Sometimes I get anxious that there won’t be food today in the dumpster,” he says. “But then I think it doesn’t even matter if there’s not. I could go for a couple of days fasting and I’d be fine. In fact it would be healthy.”

Whatever food Suelo eats, he must procure. First, he forages. He digs for onions, nettles, watercress, wildflowers. He gathers pine and cedar needles to steep in boiling water for tea. He picks and dries mulberries from shade trees in town. He picks apples and peaches from abandoned orchards, rolling and drying them into fruit leather. Other parts of the country provide more bounty. He survived a month on the California coast on blackberries, kelp, fennel, sea pollen, and mussels. The mussels he threw onto a campfire until they cracked open like pistachios.

Over the years—both before and after quitting money—Suelo has tried his hand at harvesting live animals, with mixed results. He learned to spearfish in Alaska and lived for a few months on mostly salmon. But he has never been much of a hunter. He doesn’t own a gun or a bow, and he doesn’t trap. In the Arizona desert he chased wild javelina bare-handed without success. He does, however, occasionally find a dead mammal, usually roadkill. “I found this squirrel freshly killed on the river road,” he wrote on his blog. “It had an acorn stuck between its teeth when I found it, plus about 14 acorns stuffing its cheeks!” He prepared the squirrel by skinning it, gutting it, and boiling it in a pot over a fire, more or less the method recommended in
The Joy of Cooking
. He fed it
to his friends, and posted their photos of themselves nibbling the miniature carcass online. “Their looks of contentment say it all!”