Twelve By Twelve Part 2

What chance did Mike and Michele Thompson - and their six kids - have against this? In front of the bio-sealed Gold Kist factory, I looked down at the feather in my hand, the wild quill that had fluttered out of the sky. The contrast between the freedom of that hawk, flushed out of an evergreen into the morning sky, and the industrial birds numbed by chemicals, deprived of sunlight and freedom, suggested a frightening metaphor for the way we humans have come to live in a flattening world.

IT SMELLED LIKE CHICKEN at Bobby Lu's Diner in Siler City, ten miles up the road from Jackie's. As I walked through the restaurant to an open booth, I noticed that nearly all of the fifty or so customers were eating chicken. Broiled, fried, cordon bleu; fat chicken legs and b.r.e.a.s.t.s, chemically pumped-up Gold Kist pickings. at Bobby Lu's Diner in Siler City, ten miles up the road from Jackie's. As I walked through the restaurant to an open booth, I noticed that nearly all of the fifty or so customers were eating chicken. Broiled, fried, cordon bleu; fat chicken legs and b.r.e.a.s.t.s, chemically pumped-up Gold Kist pickings.

Having seen, and smelled, the bio-sealed Gold Kist factory, I felt nauseous and skimmed the menu for something that wasn't chicken. I ordered a cheese sandwich with taters and salad. The customers, nearly all of them white, seemed to have a nearly identical glow, or lack thereof, a kind of sheen. I wondered what the effect of eating chemically enhanced food over decades has on our bodies. Do we become like factory chickens when we avoid exercise, work and live most of our lives indoors, and eat chemically altered food?

Also, is there an unconscious effect of being so close to the source of so much pain? Maybe I was imagining things, but I could almost feel the Gold Kist factory's dread in the air, an invisible violence like radio transmissions.

I had spent much of the past decade in places where humans still live in relative harmony with nature and one another, in the Global South where the land hasn't yet been domesticated, nor culture industrialized. Sociologists point out that American kids today can identify a thousand corporate logos but less than ten native plants and animals that live around their homes. Are we, like Gold Kist chickens, evolving in artificially manufactured, rather than natural, ways?

THAT NIGHT, UNDERT HE STARS, I made myself a second meal: over an open fire beside the 12 12, I grilled my five-pound broiler. In the end, I had decided that it wasn't in me to kill a chicken myself, and Mike did it for me. Perhaps in the future I'd see it differently and be able to partic.i.p.ate in that natural process: steward an animal's healthy growth; take its life, with reverence; and ingest its energy into my own. I wasn't there yet. However, it certainly was in me to support the Thompsons' free-range agriculture. I sat down to eat, alone, with care. I made myself a second meal: over an open fire beside the 12 12, I grilled my five-pound broiler. In the end, I had decided that it wasn't in me to kill a chicken myself, and Mike did it for me. Perhaps in the future I'd see it differently and be able to partic.i.p.ate in that natural process: steward an animal's healthy growth; take its life, with reverence; and ingest its energy into my own. I wasn't there yet. However, it certainly was in me to support the Thompsons' free-range agriculture. I sat down to eat, alone, with care.

In each bite, all that flavor connected with the Thompsons. After seeing the Gold Kist plant and its chicken in Bobby Lu's, I appreciated the Thompsons' efforts even more. They were taking a stand and attempting, on their quirky little farm, to heal a ruptured relations.h.i.+p with the earth's natural rhythms. In the fire and moonlight, I looked at each bite before I ate it, smelled it, felt the flesh on my tongue, exploring the texture and the taste.

Mindful eating restored some of my balance, but not all. I was too aware of how complexly interwoven our society's problems are. Each time I biked up the highway, I'd feel the asphalt harden inside. At the Quick-N-Easy convenience store, four miles from the 12 12, I sometimes encountered fights, nagging, and even viciousness between people, as if our factory-farmed Flat World causes us to go a bit nuts and peck each other. Once when I was shopping there, a man yelled at his wife in the parking lot: "Maybe if you didn't pick on her she wouldn't cry all the time!"

"Well, I didn't know she was in a picky mood," his wife answered. Doors slammed.

Another time in the parking lot, I watched a banged-up TransAm pull up beside my bike. A man, around thirty - with a Confederate-flag bandanna on his head, tattoos, and a torn, sleeveless s.h.i.+rt - flung his door open, slammed it, and yanked open the back door. He pulled out a small boy, who looked to be around six, and pulled down his pants. "Ouch," the boy protested.

"Just stand here and p.i.s.s because you won't f.u.c.king wait!" his dad said, and then: "Hurry up!" But now the boy couldn't go. His dad shook his hips, and the boy's urine finally flowed and pooled around the back tire of my bike.

"d.a.m.n it, you don't even say thank you," the man said as he pushed his son, whose pants were still half down, back into the car. They hadn't seen me.

As I biked away from the Quick-N-Easy, my tire left a short trail of urine. I had a 12 12 permaculture retreat, but where did this family go? Tires squealed and the family's car raced past me, the wife smoking a cigarette. Her son bawled, her husband fumed, and she cast a vacant stare out the window, all of us breathing the odor growing around us on a dull wind: the stench of chicken factories.

5. WARRIOR PRESENCE.

WHAT IN THE WORLD DO YOU DO?.

This is the question I started asking myself at the 12 12. In Jackie's permaculture paradise I felt increasingly energized by pulsing growth, humble simplicity, and the gentle sound of No Name Creek. But bike a mile up the road in any direction and it was Cormac McCarthy's road. This dichotomy begged the question: How could I maintain Jackie's level of positive energy under any circ.u.mstance?

I wanted to talk with Jackie about it, but she was Grey-d.o.g.g.i.ng west, without a cell phone. So I emailed her, and a few days later she replied with the phone number of a friend's where she was staying, and I immediately biked to a pay phone and called her.

It all gushed out. I told her not only about the chicken factories and the conflicts at the Quick-N-Easy, but about an inner dilemma: As an aid worker, I am confronted by global inequality all the time. Just as the Flat World chicken factories and industrial parks suck the presence out of me, so too does the pillage of the Global South's forests, mines, and oceans in order to fuel our Northern economies. And many of the countries in the Global South try to replicate this awful example.

At first, Jackie didn't say anything. I could tell she was listening deeply. I continued, suggesting that perhaps I needed to do more do more, more to help those in need. This has been my typical response: join the battle; s.h.i.+p metric tons of food to internally displaced people; combine community ecotourism with political advocacy; research and expose corporate greed.

Finally, I was all talked out. Still, Jackie didn't say anything. In the silence I remembered what she'd told me when we'd first met, and repeated it aloud now: "Don't do, be."

Jackie let out a little laugh. "Well ... yes..." she said.

I frowned and said, "But isn't that what you told me?"

Jackie began to speak. She spoke for a long while, and what emerged was a unique approach to living in today's world, a blend of spiritual pa.s.sion and secular practicality. I later came to synthesize her approach in very simple terms: see, be, do.

First, she explained, see the problem. It could be anything: resentment toward a family member; a homeless woman by the curb; a government plan to fund a bigger nuclear bomb instead of better schools. Often we look away from problems - we're busy earning a living, going to the ball game, or being depressed. This, Jackie told me, is a core error. Every one of these so-called problems is there to teach us. Either we face it, and grow toward that higher level of consciousness, or it comes back again and again, in one form or another.

Once we've garnered the courage to see the problem, it's not yet time to act. Jackie suggests that first we be be. This is the hardest part: going to that solitary place that I'd begun to discover in the deepest part of the woods beyond the 12 12. Some people call this place G.o.d, but others call it intuition, or the "still small voice," or grace, or simply presence. The name doesn't matter. It is merely a signpost for an experience we either understand directly or barely at all. For example, imagine you'd never tasted honey. I could describe "honey" for days and you still would have no real comprehension of it, but one taste would bring instant understanding. When we find a way - be it through meditation, music, prayer, your child's eyes, a shooting star, anything - to become present, we can look at problems fearlessly and with clarity.

Jackie's final step - do - is then as natural as drawing breath. You hand the homeless woman a sandwich; forgive no matter how you've been injured; join a peace study group to confront the nuclear issue with others in your community. Or take one of a thousand other actions.

As fascinating as all of this was, I resisted Jackie's message. "But you're a doer doer," I said. "While doctoring for thirty years, you've also regularly completed the Selma-Montgomery march, done the School of Americas protest in Georgia, and so much more. And soon you'll be marching across Nevada in a protest against nuclear weapons. You're not about sitting around contemplating."

After a slight pause Jackie said, "Both Einstein and Jung said the same thing in different ways: the world's problems can't be solved at the same level of consciousness at which they were created." She added that do-gooding, however outwardly n.o.ble, tends to bring the do-gooder into the blight: the same level of consciousness that creates problems like the global ecological crisis. Hence, the archetypes of the burnt-out aid or social worker, the jaded inner-city teacher, and the compromised activist. "There is someplace absolutely essential beneath beneath the doing," she said, "and it's the most important part." the doing," she said, "and it's the most important part."

"How do I find that place?" I asked.

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 pa.s.sed, 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 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 pa.s.sed, 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 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 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 them, those with warrior presence maintain beauty and control in their interior s.p.a.ce, 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 sh.e.l.ls 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, s.h.i.+vering 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. 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, compa.s.sion, and pragmatic action, regardless of the shape of the external world?

6. LIVING WELL.

Th.o.r.eAU WRITES IN WALDEN 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. 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 b.u.mper sticker: "I'd rather be smas.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed the muddy Pete to Gwen, trying - failing - to brush the mud off his white s.h.i.+rt. 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 s.h.i.+t, 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+takes. As we picked tea leaves, I explained that they were heirloom teas that Jackie was bringing back to life, Southern subst.i.tutes used during the Northern trade blockade during the Civil War. Gwen picked mint, collecting it in a small bundle using a blade of a gra.s.s 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 into the kitchen sink from the plastic tank outside. It gushed onto the greens and splashed onto Gwen's s.h.i.+rt.

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: punis.h.i.+ng people for living sustainably, for living like this. Sure, at times I'd been s.h.i.+pping 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 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"? - 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 t.i.ticaca 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 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 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 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? 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 coc.o.o.ned 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. "n.o.body'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 pa.s.sed. 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 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. 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 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-crus.h.i.+ng 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. - 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-crus.h.i.+ng 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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 s.h.i.+rt.

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. 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 cliche that "money doesn't buy happiness" is grounded in this phenomenon, habituation.

Jackie was pursuing a kind of positive psychology, not a preachy austerity; still, did her neighbors feel judged by the existence of such simplicity right next door? The Thompsons, after all, had an ordinary-sized house, three bedrooms in all, plus a nice-sized living room, a TV, and all the other electrical appliances.

Even so, looking at things through Long Island suburban eyes one day, I wondered how Mike and Michele plus six kids - eight people - could live comfortably with just three bedrooms. Until one day, while chatting with Michele Thompson on her porch, she said rather curiously: "I don't know why we built such a big house."

I didn't say anything, looking over at a colorful Muscovy taking noisy flight from the pond. I looked at the house again. Too big big? Quite the contrary, it was a prefab house, not that big at all. "We all sleep together in one room anyway," Michele continued. "So that's two bedrooms too many."

Inadvertently I frowned slightly. It just seemed weird that eight of them would sleep in a single room. Seeing my reaction Michele explained, "We sleep with the baby and littlest one in our king-sized bed, and the others either squeeze into the bed with us, or curl up together in their sleeping bags on the carpet below! Now that Zach's fourteen he sometimes sleeps in one of the other rooms, and Kyle has been known to join him. But there's always at least one of the three bedrooms empty."

What was a little odd, perhaps, from one perspective was perfectly ordinary from another. Most of the world's families sleep together in a single room. From the Gambian kunda kunda to Tibetan to Tibetan mongour mongour, necessity and tradition has Mama Bear, Papa Bear, and the Baby Bears all together in the same den. In Turkey, a census showed the most common place married couples had s.e.x was the kitchen - one of the few s.p.a.ces they could sequester away for some privacy. Going back just slightly in human evolutionary time, we find h.o.m.o sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens sleeping together in communal tents or caves, not just with eight members of the nuclear family, but in clans of thirty or forty. So the Thompsons, by homesteading, were simplifying their material lives and increasing their sense of warmth and togetherness in a way that is quite natural in 99 percent of human history and even in most of the world today. sleeping together in communal tents or caves, not just with eight members of the nuclear family, but in clans of thirty or forty. So the Thompsons, by homesteading, were simplifying their material lives and increasing their sense of warmth and togetherness in a way that is quite natural in 99 percent of human history and even in most of the world today.

DID I REALLY NEED THE CAR? Two weeks had pa.s.sed without using it, and I began to wonder. Two weeks had pa.s.sed without using it, and I began to wonder.

I recalled my years living and traveling in villages and cities throughout Africa, India, and South America, enmeshed in communities of people who lived outside modernity, who walked and biked - and swam - everywhere. In large cities like La Paz, Bolivia, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, less than 2 percent of people own cars, mostly because they can't afford them. When I lived in those places, I watched the locals and tried to emulate them. Squeezing five to a tiny taxi in La Paz you could cross the city for a quarter. Rapport usually developed among fellow pa.s.sengers in such tight quarters, leading to some fascinating conversations.

In the Bolivian Amazon, the indigenous Chiquitano people have no cars, and barely any roads - the river is their highway. They engage in what I came to call Amazon swimming, where they combine pleasure and function into a seamless activity. Instead of swimming directly up the Amazon tributaries to do the ch.o.r.e at hand - weeding a field, visiting a relative - they backstroke in a lazy, curvy pattern, sometimes chatting with a friend as both swim. They might stop midway to eat wild pineapple springing up on the river bank somewhere. I began to do this in Pine Bridge, taking the circuitous route down dirt roads for diversity or going out of my way to visit new neighbors and friends.

All the while, in front of the 12 12, that one-ton monstrosity of metal, plastic, and rubber sat as a nagging reminder of Western excess. I got in it once and turned the key, the motor roaring to life, blue smoke shooting out of the tailpipe. I turned it off and walked down to No Name Creek. Before I even reached the banks I knew what I was going to do. I knew that having that car in that place at that time was too much. I'd crossed the elusive threshold of living well. In this situation, the car didn't add anything. In fact, it rather complicated my life. Each day, one more unnecessary decision: drive or bike? With fewer options, I'd feel and be freer. And, anyway, why did I have to get anywhere faster than two wheels or two feet could take me?

I called my mom and told her. Silence.

Finally, she said, definitively: "You're keeping the car."

I tried to explain, but she told me there was no public transport in the area. I said I could take the bike ten miles to Siler City, lock it up, and get a bus from there, but she insisted.

"You're keeping keeping the car," she said, "and that's my final word." I knew it wouldn't be easy to get her to take the car back. I figured the only way to convince her was to bring her out to the 12 12 so she could see for herself. the car," she said, "and that's my final word." I knew it wouldn't be easy to get her to take the car back. I figured the only way to convince her was to bring her out to the 12 12 so she could see for herself.

[image]

THE STRENUOUS CONTOURS OF ENOUGH.

7. MOM AND LEAH VISIT.

I DROVE BACK TO CHAPEL HILL and picked up my mother, and we drove back to Jackie's. Instead of relaxing in the deep countryside, however, she grew increasingly anxious as the quiet isolation swallowed us, and particularly as we turned onto Jackie's dirt road and parked in front of the 12 12. and picked up my mother, and we drove back to Jackie's. Instead of relaxing in the deep countryside, however, she grew increasingly anxious as the quiet isolation swallowed us, and particularly as we turned onto Jackie's dirt road and parked in front of the 12 12.

"Now you're really really keeping the car," she said, a horrified look on her face as she regarded the miniature house on No Name Creek. I remembered my own first reaction: embarra.s.sed for Jackie that she lived in such cramped quarters. keeping the car," she said, a horrified look on her face as she regarded the miniature house on No Name Creek. I remembered my own first reaction: embarra.s.sed for Jackie that she lived in such cramped quarters.

In awkward silence we walked through Zone 1 and entered the house. My mother sank into the old rocking chair and soon remarked at how surprisingly roomy the place felt. We brewed tea from rainwater, picked mushrooms and asparagus for the evening meal, and watched the bees - as Jackie had predicted, they were now "swarming like a freight train" around the hive. After her initial wilderness shock, my mom blended rather easily into 12 12 life. Perhaps it was because she had a reference point: she'd served as a Catholic nun for fourteen years. Amid Jackie's material simplicity, my mom talked about entering the convent at age eighteen. She'd wake up joyfully in her cloister at five AM each day to pray in silence. When she left the convent at age thirty-two to marry my father, she had almost no material possessions.

Nor did my father. He'd been a Catholic priest for fifteen years, mostly in the Brooklyn diocese, leading the Spanish Ma.s.s for Latino communities. It was the progressive sixties, and disillusioned with the slow pace of Church reform, he left the priesthood to start a family. He met my mom at a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert and lured her out of the convent with love poetry. Then came my sister and me. My parents became college professors, and we moved into a middle-cla.s.s home on Long Island, where our backyard was a forest of pines and oaks with a maze of contemplative walking paths that dead-ended or looped into themselves. My father baptized my sister and me at home amid their group of intellectual Catholic friends from the university. In our house, there was a sense that every object - from the piano to the Renaissance paintings to our gardens - spoke of that-which-is-more-than-just-human. I think it was this unusually contemplative upbringing that opened me up to the idea of living 12 12 and also what led my parents to have an entry point for understanding it.

My mother and I hiked deep into the woods, past abandoned farmhouses, stopping to pick gra.s.s and feed it to two horses, one beige and one patterned like a chocolate chip cookie. On the way back, as the sun dipped deeper into the western sky, she told stories about my childhood, ones I'd heard a dozen times. We wondered aloud about the thirty-acre intentional community - Jackie, the Thompsons, Jose, Graciela - whether that kind of harmony between humans and nature could actually be brought to scale in twenty-first-century America.

We were almost back to No Name Creek when we both saw it at the same time: a big snake, not two feet from us.

We froze. It must have been six feet long and was dark brown, a constrictor by all appearances. Not the least bit worried about the pair of tool-making bipeds standing before it, the snake ribboned its way into a bit of bush and climbed the nearest tree, a twenty-foot oak sapling. My mom and I stood in rather awed silence as it muscled itself straight up the thin trunk. The tree had few branches, so the snake gracefully utilized any available niche to hold its lower body as it arched and wound itself skyward until its pointy head rose above the sapling's tip. Then it turned quickly into a right angle, eyeing a larger pine tree several yards away.

It eased itself up still higher, now seeming to defy gravity. Half its length rose as a straight broomstick above the tree, and it shook the tree back and forth, trying to get within jumping range of the pine, but its efforts were in vain. The pine was simply too far away, and the snake, if it did attempt the leap, would certainly fall to its death onto the rocks below.