Over the Christmas / New Year's break I had the opportunity to read a couple of books. Here is a book review of one of them.
By the way, Dr. Jackie Benton has created cards with little sayings upon them, that she rotates through everyday. One might say, "Be spontaneous" another mights say "Trust in Love" or "Be the change you want to see." If you hare having trouble sticking to New Year's goals, could a similar practice be helpful?
Blessed Be,
Joel
Powers, William.
Twelve-By-Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off
the Grid & Beyond the American Dream. New World Library, 2010.
Review:
Dr. Jackie Benton (not her real name) lives in a 12x12 foot
house on 2 acres of land. She “farms” about 5-10% of her land in permaculture,
while leaving the rest of it wooded forest. Her home has no electricity,
running water (No Name Creek runs near by), nor any plumping. As a Doctor she
could be earning $300,000 + a year, but chooses to be paid $11,000 for her
work. As a long time civil-rights and peace activist, she has found a way to
live that contributes no, to very little, in war taxes. A 12x12 structure is
not taxed in North Carolina, and by being paid only $11,000 she further avoids
war taxes. She strives to have the carbon footprint of an average
Bangadeshi. “[H]ere’s what remains
on her permaculature ship: a tiny car that she runs on biodiesel; delicious
local and organic food, 90 percent of it produced by herself or her neighbors;
fresh drinking water she collects herself at a local spring; solar flashlights
(she doesn’t use disposable batteries for anything); a slight house, with
building materials so minimal that the forests can live; and not a cent into
federal war coffers” (204). Bill Powers has the opportunity to meet Jackie, who
then invites him to stay at her home while she attends a peace walk out West.
As a World Aid Worker in the Global South, Bill struggles with what his work means. In particular, Bill
struggles with how the world seems to be flattening out under global
economic/corporate powers. Bill accepts Jackies offer, and starts a
transformative journey of his own.
I found the book moving, at times inspiring and profound. A
delight to read about another’s interior quest. While Powers is able to keep
things real, there is not a “navel gazing-ness” about how he relates his
journey. Rather, by sharing is own journey and struggles with large, big
picture issues (i.e. how to live a life that fits with his beliefs) he invites
us into opening up about our own struggles. I found this the delight and the
challenge of the book.
Here are a few quotes to give a flavor to Powers’ writing:
Quotes:
Wildcrafters:
As the days at Jackie’s passed, and the cold earth softened,
buds and tendrils began finding their shape, and I increasingly thought about
heroes. My heroes are mostly people you never hear about. They quietly go about
creating a durable vision of what it means to be American and a global citizen.
These are people whose spirits nourish me as I hoed the rows of Jackie’s place,
people like Stan Crawford, Bradley, and Jackie herself. As the world flattens,
they give hope. They are what I call wildcrafters, people shaping their inner and outer worlds to the flow of nature,
rather than trying to mold the natural world into a shape that is usable in the
industrial world. Wildcrafters leave a small ecological footprint. They don’t
conform to any outward program, manifesto, or organized group, but conform only
to what Gandhi called the “still, small voice” [see also Elijah’s experience of
God] within. I consider much of the dispersed “anti-globalization,”
pro-sustainability movement to be connected to wildcrafting. Wildcrafters
inhabit the rebel territory beyond the Flat.” (93)
Can the World Be Improved? Tao Te Ching
Down by No Name Creek one day, I read aloud to Leah from
Jackie’s copy of the Tao Te Ching,
Lao-tzu’s famous book of Chinese wisdom: “Do you think you can improve the
world?”
Without
hesitating, Leah said: “Yes.”
I
paused, and then read on: “I don’t think it can be done.”
In
unison we broke into smiles, and I continued: “The world is sacred, it can’t be
improved.”
“Hearing
that,” Leah said, “I feel a pressure lift.”
“It’s
our training,” I replied. “’You can save the world!’ It goes on to say, ‘The
master sees things as they are without trying to control them. She lets them go
their own way, and resides at the center of the circle.’”
I
turned by head to look at Leah’s profile. Neither of us said anything.
Then
she slid the book from my hand and continued reading from it: “Know the male,
yet keep to the female. Receive the world in your arms. … Know the white, yet
keep to the black. Be a pattern for the world.”
I
felt lighter, in a deep well of time, the forest around us growing more roomy.
“I like that,” I said, “about becoming a pattern for the world.” The opposites
were bouncing around in my mind: male-female, white-black.
“’Pattern’
is so much better than ‘model.’”
“Who
said anything about model?”
“Exactly.
But we always talk about role models. And model citizens. Sounds as plastic as
a model airplane, when we’re talking about an interwoven whole.” (125-6)
Growth & Rumi:
Growth in nature happens not in a linear manner but rather
through a series of pulsations. Growth is gentle; it reaches out tentatively into
new terrain. This quote from Rumi captivates me: “Your hand opens and closes,
opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would
be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and
expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”
(144)
Affluenza:
The Pauls (Sr. and Jr.) are some of Jackie’s neighbors who
are just starting out.
“Eradicate”
and “cannibalize” didn’t figure into the Pauls’ vocabulary, as they attempted
to sculpt lives that, like the Maya’s, blended with Gaia. But it is hard to
escape our internal colonization, I thought, as I noticed the increasingly
anxious looks on the Pauls’ faces. They weren’t unaware of their frost-bitten
disaster. [The Pauls have just lost most of their garden (food supply) to
frost.] But more than that there was a vast, raw land around them. They wanted
to do things! Build things! Cut trails, dam part of the river for a bigger
swimming area, and as Paul Sr. said, “put a hundred sheep out here.” A slightly
horrific vision formed in my mind of their farm in five years hence: not this
perfectly raw, deer-filled, wild space, but a domesticated pastoral idyll with
a summer camp feel. The Pauls would show people around and describe the present
moment as those terrible days “when there was absolutely nothing here.”
I
recognized this as a symptom of that contagious, middle-class virus that causes
addiction, anxiety, depression, and ennui: affluenza. The richer we get, the
poorer we feel. To fill the void, we do.
I know that feeling. Like the Pauls, I’m American, not indigenous Guatemalan. I
am conditioned to equate my self-worth with being active, productive, useful.
(145)
Idle Majority
On January 21, 1949, some two billion people woke up and got
out of bed, still unaware of the terrible things that had taken place in their
lives. Sip some tea, chat with a spouse or a neighbor, the sun tracing an arc
into the sky; take winding paths to a farm field for a few hours of work.
Lunch. Siesta. Maybe a little nooky. The day seemed the same as the one before
for half the planet’s people, but it wasn’t. Whereas before they had been,
well, regular people living regular lives, now they were something else,
something ghastly: underdeveloped.
The
day before, President Harry S. Truman, in his inauguration speech, declared
that the era of “development” had begun, thereby minting a new terminology to
conceive the world:
We must embark on a bold new
program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial
progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. The old imperialism – exploitation for
foreign profit – has no place in our plans. What we envision is a program of development.
Suddenly two billion people who had been doing all right –
like my ambling Mayan friends in Guatemala – were no longer doing all right.
They were underdeveloped. And in one of the most spectacular missionary efforts
in history, the rich nations henceforth strove to lead the underdeveloped of
the world to a paradise of development, where they too would be domesticated
and tethered to a logic of Total Work.
Truman
might have more accurately called these “underdeveloped” people the planet’s
Idle Majority, the billions who reject the Puritan work ethic and extol
leisure. This “leisure ethic,” as I’ve come to dub it, isn’t laziness; it is an
intelligent, holistic balance between doing and being. It is embodied by the
Aymaran philosophy of “living well,” which includes enough (and not more) food,
shelter, fresh air, and friendship.
In
international aid work, the philosophical chasm between living well and living
better can lead to culture clash – as well as to serious marital problems. I
know a French aid worker who married a woman from Burkina Faso. Their most difficult
problem isn’t money or in-laws but idleness. His wife, he confided to me one
day, “has to have five or six hours a day of doing absolutely nothing in order to be happy.” My friend is inclined to fill
every available moment with work, hobbies, and travel, but his wife prefers to
simply sit on the stoop watching the breeze in the trees, idly chatting and
joking. If she doesn’t get this idle time, she becomes grouchy.
On
another occasion in the Gambia, a West African country, I found myself explaining
to a local guy in a town called Gunjur, down the coast from Banjul, how workers
in the United States and Europe waged decades of union battles to win an
eight-hour workday.
He
looked at me with complete amazement, as if I had just said that Papa Smurf lived
on the moon and was waving down to us. “They fought,” he finally said, grasping
to comprehend, “to work eight hours a
day?”
“Exactly!”
I exclaimed a little proud to have shared a bit of Western labor history that
might help him in his struggles.
To
my shock, the man burst out laughing. Amid guffaws he managed to get across
that he and others in Gunjur worked three to four hours a day. It was absurd,
he said, to fight all those decades to work more, especially in a rich country!
It became a running joke with us. “Hey, Bill,” he’d say whenever he saw me, “I
think I’ll work eight hours today,” then
collapse into a belly laugh. (149-51)
Bill
goes on to talk about how Columbia, of all places, is ranked as one of the most
happiest places on the earth. Is it because their culture has better adjusted
cultures for happiness? Though it ranks below forty other countries in GDP,
Columbians continue to rank themselves as happy: 96% defined themselves as
content with life in the Biswas-Diener survey (151).
Bill
continues by writing: “When discussing relatively “poorer” countries, we need
to make a clear, explicitly distinction between people living in a state of
material destitution and people living health subsistence lifestyles. Terms
like poverty and Third World mask this distinction and give license for modern
professionals – of whom I’ve long been one – to undervalue, denigrate, and
interfere with sustainable ways to life.
“There’s
a point where one’s material life is in balance: one has neither too much nor
too little. Per my own analysis of GDP and global happiness, roughly one-fifth
of humanity has too much and is overdeveloped; another fifth has too little and
is underdeveloped. Neither of these groups experiences general well-being. The
former, with materialism caked on like a million barnacles, an rarely
experience the simple joy of being. The latter are so destitute that they can’t
sustain their bodies physically. Fortunately, the third group – those with
enough – is by far the largest. It is what I call “developed,” ranging from
subsistence livelihoods like that of the Maya of Guatemala to the level of the
average European circa 1990.
“By
this calculation, 60 percent of the world lives sustainably, in a global sense.
In other words, if everyone lived as they did, one planet – the one we’re on
right now – would suffice to feed, clothe, shelter, and absorb the waste of
everyone. (In contrast, if everyone lived at the level of the average American,
we’d require the resources of four additional earth-sized planets.) (152-3).
Soft Economy
Jackie mined these issues deeper still. She used her
household economy as a 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?
(208)
Humility: Rule #6 : Gratefulness
Rule Number 6 is “something a manger-friend would use in his
humanitarian aid projects. Whenever ego wars, slights, and offenses would
surface, someone on the team would say, “Rule Number Six,” and amazingly,
harmony would return to the situation.
I
asked what Rule Number Six was, and he told me: “Don’t take yourself so damn
seriously.”
We
both laughed, and I asked him, “What are the other five rules?”
“They
are all the same,” he said. “See Rule Number Six.”
I
consider humility as closely tied to gratefulness. Thus, if someone praises me,
I’m grateful; if they don’t, I’m also grateful. Even when I’m criticized, it’s
an opportunity to be grateful for the breath I draw at the moment, for the
sunshine and breeze, and for whatever lesson there is to learn. By being
grateful, appreciating all we have instead of focusing on what is lacking, we
allow more of the same to flow toward us. When I focus on missing Amaya, for
example, I crate a drama out of lack, of not-enough, and that becomes my
reality. Instead I can focus on how much I love her, how grateful I am that
she’s my daughter.” (217)
