So why do people call it "The Simple Life" when people move away from cities? The term really annoys me, so I decided to look it up and find out the roots. Is it simple-stupid? Or simple-uncomplex?? This is hard work, and taking a lot of responsibility for your land and animals, often without the conveniences of city-living. And we aren't even off grid! (yet)
My impression was that people thought country life or shunning rat races and the life was mundane, less ambitious (like that could be bad-um, what?) for people who are less intelligent, less creative or for those who don't 'fit in' with the norm, whatever that is. Talk about preconceived notions on my part!! Embarassing!
So here's what Wikipedia has to say about Simple Life >> Simple living, and what it really means in some contexts. The whole post is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_life and includes religion, spiritual, and anti-war angles to name a few.
Simple living encompasses a number of different voluntary practices to simplify one's lifestyle. These may include reducing one's possessions or increasing self-sufficiency, for example. Simple living may be characterized by individuals being satisfied with what they need rather than want.[1][2] Although asceticism generally promotes living simply and refraining from luxury and indulgence, not all proponents of simple living are ascetics.[3] Simple living is distinct from those living in forced poverty, as it is a voluntary lifestyle choice.
Adherents may choose simple living for a variety of personal reasons, such as spirituality, health, increase in quality time for family and friends, work–life balance, personal taste, frugality, or reducing personal ecological footprint and stress. Simple living can also be a reaction to materialism and conspicuous consumption. Some cite socio-political goals aligned with the anti-consumerist or anti-war movements, including conservation, degrowth, social justice, ethnic diversity, tax resistance and sustainable development.[4]
Reducing consumption, work time and possessions [edit]
You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.
Some people practice simple living by reducing consumption. By lowering expenditure on goods or services, the time spent earning money can be reduced. The time saved may be used to pursue other interests, or help others through volunteering. Some may use the extra free time to improve their quality of life, for example pursuing creative activities such as art and crafts (see starving artist). Developing a detachment from money has led some individuals, such as Suelo and Mark Boyle, to live with no money at all.[18][19] Reducing expenses may also lead to increase savings which can lead to financial independence and the possibility of early retirement.[20]
Another approach is to focus more fundamentally on the underlying motivation of buying and consuming so many resources for
a good
quality of life.[citation needed] Though our society often seeks to buy happiness, materialism very frequently fails to satisfy, and may even increase the level of stress in life. It has been said that "the making of money and the accumulation of things should not smother the purity of the soul, the life of the mind, the cohesion of the family, or the good of the society."[21] There are eco-anarchist groups in the United States and Canada today promoting lifestyles of simplicity. Simple living can entail only consuming the resources needed to sustain life.
The grassroots awareness campaign, National Downshifting Week (UK)[22] (founded 1995) encourages participants to positively embrace living with less. Campaign creator, British writer and broadcaster on downshifting and sustainable living, Tracey Smith says, "The more money you spend, the more time you have to be out there earning it and the less time you have to spend with the ones you love". National Downshifting Week encourages participants to 'Slow Down and Green Up' and contains a list of suggestions for individuals, companies, children and schools to help adopt green or eco-friendly policies and habits, develop corporate social and environmental responsibility in the workplace, and create eco-protocols and lessons that work alongside the national curriculum, respectively.
Reducing possessions or the size of home can also form part of simple living. The 100 Thing Challenge is a grassroots movement to whittle down possessions to a mere 100 items, with the aim of decluttering and simplifying people's lives.[23] The small house movement includes individuals who chose to live in small mortgage-free low-impact dwellings, such as log cabins or beach huts.[24]
Increasing self-sufficiency [edit]
One way to simplify life is to get back-to-the-land and grow your own food, as increased self-sufficiency reduces dependency on money and the economy. Tom Hodgkinson believes the key to a free and simple life is to stop consuming and start producing.[25]
Forest gardening, developed by simple living adherent Robert Hart, is a low-maintenance plant-based food production system based on woodland ecosystems, incorporating fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables.[26] Hart created a model forest garden from a 0.12 acre (500 m²) orchard on his farm at Wenlock Edge in Shropshire.[27]
The idea of food miles, the number of miles a given item of food or its ingredients has travelled between the farm and the table, is used by simple living advocates to argue for locally grown food. This is now gaining mainstream acceptance, as shown by the popularity of books such as The 100-Mile Diet, and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. In each of these cases, the authors devoted a year to reducing their carbon footprint by eating locally.[28]
City dwellers can also produce fresh home grown fruit and vegetables in pot gardens or miniature indoor greenhouses. Tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, peas, strawberries, and several types of herbs can all thrive in pots. Jim Merkel says that a person "could sprout seeds. They are tasty, incredibly nutritious, and easy to grow... We grow them in wide mouthed mason jars with a square of nylon window screen screwed under a metal ring".[29] One argument against gardening at home is how often people begin a garden and later stop it. Farmer Matt Moore spoke on this issue: "How does it affect the consumer to know that broccoli takes 105 days to grow a head?," [...] "The supermarket mode is one of plenty — it's always stocked. And that changes our sense of time. How long it takes to grow food — that's removed in the marketplace. They don't want you to think about how long it takes to grow, because they want you to buy right now".[30] One way to change this viewpoint is also suggested by Mr. Moore. He placed a video installation in the produce section of a grocery store that documented the length of time it took to grow certain vegetables.[30] This raises awareness in people of the length of time actually needed for gardens and could easily be combined with online lectures to help new gardeners.
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So there it is--what do you think? It's sort of funny, this life we've been building since buying that wonderful little house in Saanich. I'm sure people get sick of some of my rants. I'm certainly not trying to come off as self righteous--I've just learned a helluva lot in the last few years, and I feel compelled to share the important bits--especially on the happiness front. I'm not a foodie, I hate to cook, but really at heart I guess I'm an ecologist and when it comes to industrial food production and what it's doing to the planet..well, there are smart choices we can make for ourselves and our families and take more responsibility for ourselves and our planet and stop blaming it all on government. Oops, I ranted. Back on topic...
Farmer Andy on the Chicken Thistle Farm podcast has a funny rant about what happened after the Boston Marathon bombing. Of course they weren't making light of the tragedy. The issue, which I have to agree with, is that a policeman had to take the time to deliver milk to a family who couldn't take care of themselves for ONE DAY during the lockdown, while the search for the fugitive was taking place.
Survivalism and it's whole range of colours is another topic for another day I suppose, but I guess one of the things I like about this whole 'simple life' is not living in a bubble anymore, which to me feels a lot more REAL. I'd rather plan ahead and use my brain to solve problems and get creative in the moment and feel some satisfaction from THAT. Otherwise I swear we just get caught in an endless search for what satisfies us but doesn't sustain us--often through material things. This is coming from someone who has a house four times bigger than I need, and we're about to get a second vehicle which is something we've tried to avoid. And I struggle with gardening because I still need more immediate gratification for things--not waiting five years to see a tree bloom etc. I'm working on it!
I love what Bryan Brett has to say, in his book Trauma Farm--A Rebel History of Rural Life. http://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Farm-Rebel-History-Rural/dp/1553658035 (About his farm on Salt Spring Island, BC)
"...But we are paying too much attention to the wrong information. Certainly, there's little harm in zoning out with a well designed piece of gaming technology. Urban living has many glories. But if we consider how we surround ourselves with repetitive trivial information and celebrity gossip it's apparent we have become sleepwalkers who've forgotten the grandeur of the planet--the osprey and its hunt.
When I consider the sixteenth-century peasant who supposedly knew so little, I think of someone who could smell hay and recognize its food value, identify hundreds of medicinal flowers, berries and vegetables, and tell you when to plant or harvest and how to preserve; someone who could milk a cow and create or fix almost any tool in the house; someone who lived for the most part in grace with a natural environment (when not being victim to the politics of the era). Comparing "old knowledge" with the knowledge of how to operate a remote control or play a new video game, it's clear that an important range of experience has been lost. What can we say to a world where a child on a bus in Vancouver looks out the window and asks his mother, "Is that a crow?"
"Almost every farmer I know, male or female, has the ability to stand still, gazing--at things or events most urban dwellers wouldn't even notice--often with the wry, laconic expression of the experienced" "Well, would you look at that?" Yet we're a diminishing crowd of gawkers standing in our pastures or walking through the frozen wheat fields of the winter prairie, the Brazil nut forests of South America, the Southwestern mesa valleys with their peach trees, or the bamboo jungles of Thailand. "Being there" has become a tourist experience, not a way of life. Now that the human communtiy is urban and cocooned we find ourselves without natural miracles, addicted to the fast-edited images of media that can give people vertigo when the images are flashed at epileptic-fit-inducing frequencies. The world has become a jumpy, twitichy place. Though riding a roller coaster can be fun, we also need to capacity to walk slowly. Like farmers, people from aboriginal culutres also have a tendency to move and talk slowly, until the moment calls for an explosion of action. This leads to a dry humour. If you've lived long enough with the landscape you learn to smile because you never know how the world will come at you."
"Absurdity has lived with the planet since the first cell divided. The mutations that led to the platypus and the nuclear bomb are the ultimate theatre of the absurd. Thats why cultures need their tricksters as much as they need their heroes.........It's the noise of the world. "Ridiculously incongruous or unreasonable" And we all encounter it in our daily living.
Because I've been living in the impressively varied kingdom of Trauma Farm, I suspect I see more of the absurd than many people. Sometimes I think I've spent my life hauling hay in the rain. But human encounters with the strange and nonlinear carry greater weight when lives depend on them, as any soldier or pistol-toting gang kid in the urban wastelands will tell you. Fighting with a computer for ten hours only to discover you failed to tick a software function doesn't carry the same visceral impact as a tractor running out fo fuel in a fire pile, or a bull falling into an abandoned well. This could account for the rising need for extreme adventure toursim among urbanites."
Interesting thoughts, for sure. I'd be interested in hearing what people think. Does any of it resonate with you? It seems so many people I know between 20-40 are trying out things like this, and not just because some of them had hippy parents. Maybe the current young generation isn't the only one with nature deficit disorder.
I'm certainly not about to join an eco-anarchist group or anything like that, I'm just trying to find what's real to me, and what feels true. I realize this is different for everyone. I'm just glad I got on to this journey while I'm still young-ish.
Boldly go! Seek absurdism and grandeur! Avoid the sleepwalker zombie human apocalypse! ; )
Really? no one has any thoughts on this?
ReplyDeleteI just finally caught up on your blog and am too tired to write anything meaningful - but that book (Trauma Farm) is the one I just finished! Now I can't remember if you'd recommended it to me.
ReplyDeleteYa I did!! what did you think? I liked the story of the author having to crawl under the porch to get the dog and her pups out...and the tractor in the fire lol.
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