She replied: “Have you asked the creek?”
THE WOODS ARCHED above No Name Creek, their color wrung out, browns against a pale sky. I sat, listening to the creek gurgle and murmur on its stones. An hour passed, then two. Three. The sun had peaked and dipped westward when I began to put something together. In twenty years of meditation and spiritual search I’ve noticed that the people who really “get it” in the sense of beautifully blending inner peace with loving action have something in common. It doesn’t seem to matter whether they are Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Catholic, or born-again pagan. They have what might be called “warrior presence.” In other words, they face larger problems just as they face their personal problems — as Einstein and Jung suggest we do — on a different level of consciousness than the one at which the problems were created. Instead of allowing the negative forces of a flattening world to flatten them, those with warrior presence maintain beauty and control in their interior space, through being fully present in the moment.
Was this what Jackie was suggesting? I’d been by the creek for four hours now, maybe five, and I felt more alone than ever. But, remarkably, I did not feel lonely. Whereas loneliness is clingy and needy, solitude — I increasingly sensed — is expansive and luminous. You can feel lonely in a 5K race with hundreds of others or even at your own surprise birthday party. This is because inside each of us is a place of absolutely no connection to others. That place is like a bottomless open well. We try to shine floodlights into the well, fill it with toxic rubbish, or board it over with activity and routine. But if we don’t befriend the well — if we’re not strong in solitude — then on one level our relationships can be tinged with insecurity.
It occurred to me, beside No Name Creek, that by living 12 × 12 Jackie has been cultivating an interest in the well; leaning over, peering in. She has the genuine confidence and lightness of spirit of those who have taken the interior journey. She whispers into solitude’s well without fear of the voice that might come back. Ducklings, like the ones the Thompsons raised, develop alone in their shells and — though they rub feathers with others during their brief lives — they essentially live alone and die alone. We are like those ducklings. If we lose ourselves in material things, anxiety, work, and personal dramas of various sorts — and thereby miss our beautiful interiority — then perhaps we miss ourselves.
A doctor friend in New York City once told me that when she looks through an ordinary ophthalmoscope, she can see through the retinal wall clear to the edge of the brain. It’s that close. And the brain, seen like that through the eye, looks like what it is: a gray glob. When we look out at the world through our eyes, who or what is doing the looking? Am “I” that gray glob? It’s so mysterious. I stood there in the forest, feeling my heartbeat, aware of the creaking in the trees above, shivering slightly, beginning to sense that we humans are nature become conscious of itself.
See, be, do. Yes, I thought, being was indeed the most difficult part in an era where clutter — in both stuff and activity — eclipses the sweetness of solitude, the aliveness of the present moment.
I got up and walked away from the creek, the sun now hanging low to the west. I looked at the 12 × 12, a muted orange light reflecting off its windows. It’s one thing to ponder warrior presence in the peace of the woods. But I knew it would be difficult to live it. At some point, my 12 × 12 retreat would end, and I wondered if I’d be as strong as Jackie when the inevitable challenges came. Would I be capable of drawing from deep wells of optimism, compassion, and pragmatic action, regardless of the shape of the external world?
6. LIVING WELL
THOREAU WRITES IN WALDEN that he had more visitors during those two years in the woods than at any other period of his life. Just as my curiosity led me to visit Jackie in the woods, so too did my curious family and friends begin visiting me.
I’d chosen not to bring a mobile phone to the 12 × 12, and so I was anxious the night my friends Dan and Gwen, cell talkers both, were coming to dinner. I cringed at the thought of metallic ring tones and jargon-laden work talk echoing through the 12 × 12, an annoying reminder of the technological bulldozer currently flattening the world.
They arrived abuzz with energy in a station wagon (its sole bumper sticker: “I’d rather be smashing imperialism”) with their two-year-old son, Pete. Longtime urbanites, the late thirty-something couple had moved to Chapel Hill six months earlier because of a job offer. Dan disappeared with little Pete as I cooked pesto pasta on the propane-powered, four-burner stovetop while chatting with Gwen.
When dinner was ready, we called for Dan and Pete. No response, so we wandered along the dirt road and finally found them over at the Thompsons’ farm. Dan was pulling his giggling two-year-old son out of the deep mud — and thereby getting covered in mud himself.
Noticing Dan’s woeful expression over the mess, Michele Thompson tried to comfort him, saying, “Oh, my kids do that all the time.” But the urban Dan and Gwen became increasingly anxious over their single child. I wondered how it was that Michele, with six kids, always managed to maintain a state of apparent harmony.
Dan passed the muddy Pete to Gwen, trying — failing — to brush the mud off his white shirt. Meanwhile, Mike Thompson heaped feed among the goats, chickens, and ducks, driving them into a Pavlovian frenzy. Kyle came running down in his Boy Scout uniform and threw additional cups of feed into the animal swarm. Along with Pete, three of the Thompson kids formed a chorus line and danced for the animals. Michele momentarily disappeared into the house, then came waltzing back down with her infant, one of the cutest little Buddhas I’ve seen. I took her in my arms, and she smiled up at me with her big eyes, fat lips, and tiny teeth, squirming in all her uncoordinated perfection. Gwen peppered Michele with questions about bantams and Muscovys, while kids ran around with handfuls of eggs, baby chicks, and feed. A swirl of fowl, mammals, and humans in a buzzing state of joyful chaos.
As we walked back around the pond toward Jackie’s, the amazed Gwen said, “It’s like Bolivia.”
“Like Africa,” said Dan.
“It even smells like Bolivia — or Africa — chicken shit, and the stale water in those rusty wheelbarrows.” They had had little idea that this sort of life was being lived less than twenty miles from their own house.
They’d brought the most exquisite chocolate truffles, which looked vaguely aristocratic and especially lovely displayed in the 12 × 12. The truffles proved scrumptious, as did the pesto pasta, salad fresh from Jackie’s garden, and caper bread with local cheeses. As we munched away on the porch, Gwen said, “It tastes so much better outside, like when you’re camping.”
“We are camping,” Dan said.
We drank ginger tea and savored Equal Exchange dark chocolate and some of the truffles. “The rest better go into the refrigerator,” Gwen said.
“What’s a refrigerator?” I replied.
“Yeah,” Gwen said, laughing, “what the hell is a refrigerator?”
The whole evening buzzed and popped with a sort of relaxed electricity, partly because of the absence of electricity. I found that to be the same with all 12 × 12 visitors — a kind of wonder and good feeling animated their visits. Riddles and puzzles abounded in a tiny house secretly hiding in the middle of an empire. Instead of acting out the expected roles of thirty-somethings at a polite dinner party, we turned into little kids exploring each object, each being, each moment.
Dan loved the bees and the asparagus (“so that’s how it grows”), and Pete discovered Jackie’s metal lizard sculptures hiding behind the shiitakes. As we picked tea leaves, I explained that they were heirloom teas that Jackie was bringing back to life, Southern substitutes used during the Northern trade blockade during the Civil War. Gwen picked mint, collecting it in a small bundle using a blade of a grass to tie it together. Dan yanked up green onions for their own kitchen. While I was chopping the tomatoes, I asked them to go outside and cut some lettuce; they did and washed it in cool rainwater, which they hand-pumped i
nto the kitchen sink from the plastic tank outside. It gushed onto the greens and splashed onto Gwen’s shirt.
They asked me how I was doing. I told them I was surprised how normal it felt. My bathroom showers were easily replaced by outdoor solar showers; I’d automatically fill the five-gallon diaphragm with water at night, and it would warm up in the sun all day. Instead of a flush toilet, a composting toilet. Instead of a refrigerator for veggies, Jackie’s garden. Most luxurious of all, each night was blessed not only with moon and starlight but with the warm, inspiring glow of candles. The stars and candlelight gave the place a meditative feel that evening. Pete fell asleep in a bundle on the floor. Dan explored Jackie’s aphorisms, taped above the table and on the ladder, and read aloud: “The difference between actually very serious and actually very funny is actually very thin.”
He laughed and his eyes jumped to a group photo. “Which one is Jackie?” he asked. Gwen and Dan both stared for a long time at her, that aquiline nose, those blue eyes, and the long, pepper gray hair. They continually asked questions about Jackie, her background, the Thompsons, and Adams County’s other quirky characters. They weren’t going to give up their electricity, piped water, and plumbing, but they left still asking questions, and they drove home questioning. Gwen told me later they still sometimes puzzle over the riddle of Jackie’s 12 × 12.
As they were leaving I felt happy, centered, and energized. Yes, their cell phones had gone off during the evening, but it hadn’t bothered me. It was simply part of who they were. Then, under the stars, my mind wandered to my past ten years of work in the Global South, and I felt a pang of guilt over what I’d often been doing: punishing people for living sustainably, for living like this. Sure, at times I’d been shipping food and medicines to people on the edge of starvation — in postwar countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia. But in other projects my own ethnocentricity over what it means to “live better” allowed me to drive a fancy white jeep into subsistence communities — ones that already had enough — and preach the gospel of Ever More. Subtle, to be sure. I wasn’t preaching shopping malls and superhighways, but rather better clinics and schools, more efficient agriculture, the standard aid fare, the rhetoric of conventional Western wisdom. But isn’t the end result of all that to turn “them” into “us”?
A shooting star blazed across the sky, its ember trail leaving an afterglow. Looking up into the heavens, I considered a fundamental question: Is the modern project, the flattening world, ultimately leading us to greater happiness, health, and environmental sustainability? There’s so much we can learn from the cultures of the Global South. I thought of Honamti, on the bank of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, his world circling in three ways. That day he also told me about the Aymara idea of “living well.” He said the Aymara do not seek to improve their lot in a material sense. The idea is not to live better, but to live well: friends, family, healthy body, fresh air and water, enough food, and peace. Jackie joked once that she was “downwardly mobile.” A lot of people would call her poor. But perhaps she had consciously scaled back from the paradigm of living better — with its high levels of environmental destruction, collective anxiety, and personal depression — to living well, something more akin to Aristotle’s golden mean, the lovely midpoint, where many in the world still live, and live quite well.
FOR JACKIE, SIMPLICITY ISN’T A PURITANICAL ASCETICISM. It’s not about denial; rather, it’s a creative process. Jackie isn’t trying to inspire people to live 12 × 12. She told me once that those are the correct dimensions of her life, as a single person with grown children. Those who live with families, with kids and relatives, the majority of people, obviously require larger dimensions. So, where is the point of enough for each of us?
For me at the 12 × 12, “enough” definitely included a car. Absolutely. No doubt about it. Isolated deep in the country without electricity, water, phone, or an internet connection (though I did bring a laptop for writing), I needed a car for pragmatic reasons as well as to provide a kind of emotional escape valve from so much nature. Still, I found myself inclined to bike everywhere. I’d brought along a twenty-six-dollar used three-speed I’d picked up in a thrift shop in Chapel Hill. Most days I’d bike up and down Jackie’s lane with Kyle Thompson; I also began using it to go to the post office in Pine Bridge, and the shop in Smithsville, four miles up the road, or ten miles into Siler City. The bike became a way to exercise my body and to lift my spirits. Instead of being cocooned in plastic and metal, insulated from the world, I was flying free, fully exposed to the sun and wind and the grit of life. Instead of the angry groan and poisoned cough of a combustion engine, I had silence and the constant respiration and heartbeat of a living world.
The car belonged to my parents — they had two and were happy to let me use one during my time in the 12 × 12. For the first few days I was glad to have it, using it to get around the rural area. Then, without even realizing it, I stopped driving.
The car sat idle for a full week, then another. With my bike I moved more slowly, and the world grew larger and more interesting. I biked country roads through the rolling farms and woods, and the landscape revealed itself to me in depth and nuance. But there was one problem. I was the only one biking out there in the middle of rural North Carolina, so I was an oddity. There are more vehicles in the United States than people. Not having a car is generally viewed as one step away from living out of a shopping cart. The stares I’d get as I biked down Old Highway 117 South ranged from blank to scowling. That’s when Mike Thompson taught me the North Carolina wave.
“It’s like this,” he said. He pretended to be holding handlebars and flipped two fingers and a thumb off the grip for a long second. And put them back.
“That’s it?” I said. “Nobody’s going to see that.”
Mike laughed. “Just try it.”
On my next bike trip to check email in the Smithsville Public Library, I flashed an NC wave to the first pickup that passed. The results were instantaneous: a flash of two fingers and a thumb while the driver gripped the steering wheel. I tried it again. Another NC wave returned. As an experiment I tried a hand-in-the-air, buongiorno principessa wave a few times and was met immediately with suspicious frowns. The NC wave was a kind of secret handshake that proclaimed: I’m from here, too.
Buoyed by this new insight, I read my email at the little library, chuckling over a satirical article a friend sent me from The Onion:
CINCINNATI — The blank, oppressive void facing the American consumer populace remains unfilled despite the recent launch of the revolutionary Swiffer dust-elimination system, sources reported Monday. The lightweight, easy-to-use Swiffer is the 275,894,973rd amazing new product to fail to fill the void — a vast, soul-crushing spiritual vacuum Americans of all ages face on a daily basis…. Despite high hopes, the Swiffer has failed to imbue a sense of meaning and purpose in the lives of its users.
Biking home, I asked myself: Did that car in front of the 12 × 12 imbue me with a sense of meaning and purpose? Blissfully, I exchanged NC waves with truck drivers and older men on porches. I noticed the sun, the wind, and my heart racing; pulse up (thump, thump, thump), the heart banging on my rib cage like sweaty, joyous palms on a drum, the butterfly spreading and drying its new, wet wings, and I was home quicker than ever. Up Jackie’s lane, waving across the pond to Mike in his bright red shirt, and wheeling into Jackie’s world. The slight, subtle abode, opening its door, smelling Jackie — her spices, her clothes — now mixed with my smells — my cooking, bread, cheeses, and the sweat on the previous day’s shirt.
AFTER A DECADE LIVING IN GLOBAL SOUTH countries that often seemed as spiritually rich as they were materially poor, I couldn’t help asking myself about simplicity.
I came across the work of a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Martin Seligman, who had managed to cut rates of depression in clinical studies. He calls his method “positive psychology.” In contrast with our mainstream therapy culture, which tends to focus on what�
�s wrong, Seligman focuses on what’s right — the factors that contribute to our general well-being, a state of inner joy and security. He found that three elements contribute to this: positive emotion, engagement, and a sense of meaning and purpose.
The first factor, positive emotion, is necessary but not sufficient. If it’s bought for the price of Prozac or a bottle of wine, it’s transient. To last, it must come out of the second two factors.
The second, engagement in the moment, is akin to how you feel listening to an amazing live jazz show or symphony orchestra, a sense of being “lost in the music.” This engagement can happen anytime, whether you are painting, gardening, or cooking. When you are in that state, if someone were to suddenly interrupt and ask what you were feeling, the answer would probably be: nothing. Absorbed in the moment, you’ve transcended the narrow ego and become, in a real sense, one with the task at hand.
The third factor, a sense of meaning and purpose, happens when that activity you’re so wrapped up in also contributes to a larger cause. In other words, complete engagement in shopping or NASCAR may give a temporary buzz, but it leaves an existential hangover.
Jackie, I noticed, cultivated the second two factors in her life. She was completely engaged in her permaculture, activism, and doctoring, and all of these contributed to a higher purpose. The first factor — positive emotion — then flowed naturally, as when she told me she wakes up with “tears of joy” in the 12 × 12. As love is seemingly without limits, so too are these more intangible factors. None of the factors of genuine well-being are closely linked to material possessions. All material possessions are subject to habituation, a waning interest with repeated uses. Think of that first bite of ice cream: bliss. The second, also delicious, but perhaps 80 percent of the first. The third, yumyum; the tenth, ho-hum. So the cliché that “money doesn’t buy happiness” is grounded in this phenomenon, habituation.
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