Twelve by Twelve (27 page)

I remember feeling anxious when my mother, several years back, proposed the idea of a no-buy Christmas in our family. We’d make things for each other or figure out other ways to express love and gratefulness.
Wouldn’t it feel stingy?
I thought. After all, we’d typically had dozens of wrapped gifts piled under the tree. Then Christmas morning arrived, and I gathered around the tree with my parents, my sister, her husband, and their son. There were few gifts underneath it, making each one more special. My father gave my sister and me excerpts from his journal around the time of our birth, where he reflected on the joy we brought him. I gave my parents and sister each a beautiful shell I’d found in a village on the Gambian coast, sharing with them the story of a day without money, and what it taught me about the importance of belonging, not belongings. They still have those shells prominently displayed in their homes, as bells — or rather shells — of mindfulness. My sister, tapping into her talents, painted us beautiful wall hangings with inspirational words
on them. It was a meaningful, deeply joyous Christmas. Though we have not kept up a strict no-buy Christmas practice, the experiment woke us up to an empowering fact: We can create our own culture around gift-giving. Since then we’ve reduced gifts to a fraction of what they were while still experiencing an abundance of love and togetherness.

JACKIE MINED THESE ISSUES DEEPER STILL
. She used her household economy as radical rebellion. I have spent years exploring ways to weave a softer economy into my life, and her example pushed me further.

Declare independence from the corporate global economy
, Jackie seemed to say. Doing so has two synergetic positive effects. First, by simplifying her life and working less, she creates less garbage on the planet. Second, the time and space she liberates nourish her. We exchange something very precious for money: our life energy. Do we want to spend our time and energy earning money and contributing to the market economy, or fostering creative pursuits, our relationships, and community, and contributing love?

One way I’ve tried to do this is to take regular “sabbaticals” (what Tim Ferris, in his book
The Four-Hour Workweek
, calls “mini-retirements” interspersed throughout your life). I have found them to be the absolute richest parts of my life; they create time and space for my creativity to flourish. During the sabbaticals — the time in the 12 × 12 turned out to be one of them — I followed my bliss instead of the necessity to pay bills. I found my voice as a writer during such periods of “moodling”: walking along abandoned railroad tracks, bathing in creeks and rivers, listening to crickets and macaws, meditating, reading hundreds of books, and growing flowers and food. These activities and nonactivities require little money but abundant time.

My father taught me an important lesson when I was a teenager:
live within — or below — your means. He taught me this by putting me to work. Even though he had money to spare, he had me bus tables at a restaurant starting at age sixteen so that I’d earn my own spending money. I also worked through college, first in a pizza restaurant and then at one of Brown’s libraries, and also through graduate school, by then in part-time professional positions at the World Bank and World Conservation Union, earning enough to pay off all my Stafford Loans on graduation day. He instilled in me the connection between life energy — my sweat — and dollars; this can also be understood as the interconnection of the material and the spiritual.

Unfortunately, I forgot my Dad’s lesson after undergraduate university. Suddenly I had debt on two credit cards and lived from paycheck to paycheck. A good friend handed me Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez’s
Your Money or Your Life
, which argues that we trade our precious hours of life for money, then use that money for things that bring little satisfaction. Their idea is to ratchet down personal expenses and grow savings in order to have less need to work for money and, thus, more free time to focus on what we really love.

This new take on voluntary simplicity was dubbed post-capitalist. People from modern, industrial societies were for the first time consciously scaling back consumption instead of trying to increase it. One PBS documentary showed professional couples in Holland, a hotbed of post-capitalism, selling their cars and riding only bikes. They also scaled back to the bare minimum of household products. As one Dutchman explained, “With shampoo, I start by using half my normal amount. If that still lathers, I use half of that half. I keep halving it each time until it has no effect, and then I increase the amount slightly every day until I find the perfect quantity.”

Influenced by these ideas, I began tracking every penny that went out of my life in an account book each evening, and I was amazed to find that some 30 percent of my expenses were on things that, in the end, I decided weren’t worth the exchange of my life
energy. I graphed it over the months, watching the line of expenses go down without any drop in the quality of my lifestyle. I paid off the debts and took a pair of scissors to my credit cards and have since used only debit cards. I never made a bundle as a junior high school teacher at a Native American school, nor later as an aid worker, but I always “paid myself first” before paying the other bills, depositing 10 percent of every paycheck into investments. I taught myself fnancial planning for free on the helpful Motley Fool website. Over time, I found myself living well below my means with enough of a buffer to fund those creativity sabbaticals.

Ironically, the more I treated my life energy as sacred and lived frugally, the more I was able to indulge myself; I could gush generously where it counted. I learned this during my decade among the world’s Idle Majority, the leisureologists of the Global South. Subsistence cultures have a forest instead of a supermarket; board games and guitars on stoops instead of minigolf and other paid entertainment. They aren’t materially rich, yet I found myself continually amazed by their generosity — in the form of a meal, a bed, and all the time in the world to be with you. In that spirit I support the Sierra Club and other worthy causes, especially those that spontaneously arise in my daily life. And I don’t cringe over a ffty-dollar bag of organic and local groceries because that’s the actual cost of producing food in a healthy world. That same bag at Safeway is cheap because the costs to the environment — of pesticides, soil erosion, cultural erosion, and genetic modification of life forms — are not included in the price. Can we look beyond the sticker price to see the true cost of our goods, and our economy?

FOSTER A SOFT ECONOMY

THE SOLITUDE, THE SPACE
, the time by the creek, all of it helped break the skin of the cocoon I’d been in. As spring emerged into fullness, I felt the structure of my cellular tissue dissolve and re-form, and something new begin to emerge.

During those days I felt that if a hummingbird were to fly into me, I’d break out in tears. Inside this softer world the trellises filled in with greenery, the bones of plants found their leaves, the canopy cast fuller shadows. I ate olive caper bread with cheese from a local farm, chewing each bite thirty times to fully appreciate it. As I chewed — and chewed — I noticed the new lettuce rows, garlic, the walking onions, asparagus, shiitake mushrooms, larger on their logs. This lives.

Next to this flourishing garden was my bike, just waiting, an ongoing invitation to pedal into air and silence. I sometimes biked alone, other times with Kyle, and I hung out with Hector when José was at work. Sometimes I gardened with the Thompson kids. They taught me new things about permaculture, things Jackie had taught them. She would have them over all the time, they told me, and teach
them about her garden. Greg used a push mower to cut the grassy parts around the 12 × 12, while Kyle and I weeded the lettuce, onions, and asparagus. Afternoons passed in banter and work, and before we knew it the chores were done.

But something about my mood those days bothered me. At one point I read a news story about a general census in Great Britain, in which four hundred thousand people identified their religion as “Jedi,” or among the lightsaber-wielding characters in
Star Wars
. Okay, I thought, that’s an ironic statement for some, but there must be plenty among those hundreds of thousands who all too seriously think of themselves as enlightened crusaders battling the Dark Side of the Force.

The story about UK Jedis woke me up to something that was happening, unconsciously, in me. As I learned about wildcrafting, warrior presence, and compassion, and began to reduce my carbon footprint, consume more responsibly, and eat fair, organic, and local food, my ego grew attached to the idea that I was becoming “more enlightened.” Walking the aisles of the organic Adams Market, I looked around and saw what I might become: a holier-than-thou progressive, carving an identity niche out of being so darn responsible. I was actually, in many ways, trying to eliminate my individual ego identity through warrior presence. The trap, I was discovering, was that the fiction of the ego is replaced by an even heavier fiction: that of being a Jedi, a spiritual warrior, an enlightened being — and therefore better than those miserable people who are not. This is why so many supposed spiritual teachers have such big egos; they’ve fallen into this very trap of specialness and are therefore not real teachers at all. It’s high irony: building an ego out of the notion of having conquered it.

Afterward, I was looking at the 12 × 12 one day, and I suddenly saw it differently. The luster it held for me vanished, and for an instant, it was a mere shack. You could easily view it that way. Likewise, Jackie — if you bumped into her walking along the railroad
tracks and Old Highway ii’ South in central North Carolina — might not appear particularly noteworthy. Her oversized navy blue jacket, the salt-and-pepper hair, small frame, slightly off-white teeth, mild Southern drawl. She certainly wouldn’t identify herself as a doctor (she never uses the title Dr. Benton) or try to impress you as a Wise One. She might seem a jolly lady out for a stroll.

And that’s what she is. Jackie is wise, spiritual, and inspiring, but she’s completely unattached to any of this. That is to say, she’s humble. Like the classic Tao master, she is an ordinary person.

IN LEAH’S WHITE APARTMENT
, the giant tree hovered above, its now leafier branches brushing lightly on the windows. I smelled herbs from Jackie’s and spotted a dozen of the Thompsons’ eggs on her counter. We’d begun reading less and viscerally experiencing more, but we maintained our habits of juggling several books at once. She dipped into the play
Homebody/Kabul
(she was interviewing playwright Tony Kushner the next day) and Thich Nhat Hahn; I was reading
The Solace of Open Spaces
and a volume of Galway Kinnell’s poetry. We’d occasionally look up from our books and exchange glances. I read aloud to her Kinnell’s poem about a little boy who sleeps soundly through a litany of alarmingly loud household noises:

but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
… he appears — in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small he has to screw them on.

The tree swayed above us, and I told her one of my most frightening memories. When my daughter was three months old, she suddenly stopped breathing. Her mom and I rushed her by taxi to a Bolivian hospital. I tried desperately to rouse Amaya, to feel some sign of life, but there was nothing. Amaya’s mom couldn’t even
touch our daughter; she let out these primal wails as we skidded to a stop at the emergency room.

As soon as Amaya landed on the gurney, she woke up, blinked once, and began to bawl. The doctor told us this happens. The infant has such a long day that it goes into a coma-like sleep where it can’t be roused.

Leah put a hand on my shoulder. I looked out the window, wanting to hold my daughter. We sat there for a long time. Finally, Leah took Kinnell out of my hand and read his short poem “Prayer”:

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is
is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

I looked through an open window at algae green plants, heard birds, and felt the breeze, and these senses became one, whipped together into a batter of silence. Presence began to grow. We talked about the poem, untangling those three lovely
is
’s, the strong full stop (“But that.”). Leah said that the “what is” in the poem was her idea of God. Whatever
what is
is, is what she wants. Her old cowboy boots stood at attention next to my sneakers by the back door.
Only that. But that.

DOWN BY NO NAME CREEK ONE DAY
, I noticed how, in the present light, it looked so ordinary. A creek, one of a hundred in the area. There’s a Zen saying that goes like this: When I was young, mountains were just mountains. As I matured, I realized that they were so much more than mountains. And now that I am older, I realize that they are just mountains.

This is the vital step between the wet, still flightless thing that emerges from the cocoon and a soaring butterfly: giving up the idea of being a butterfly. I noticed that writings about humility abounded in the 12 × 12, as if when Jackie reached certain levels of success as a
physician, an activist, and an “enlightened” human being, she had to fortify herself with ordinariness to maintain simplicity, joy, stewardship, and compassion.