There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth. --Leo Tolstoy

Sophisticated Simplicity

--by Duane Elgin, syndicated from ecoliteracy.org, Apr 29, 2014

What kind of "stewardship" fits our emerging world? When we consider the powerful forces transforming our world — climate change, peak oil, water and food shortages, species extinction, and more — we require far more than either crude or cosmetic changes in our manner of living. If we are to maintain the integ­rity of the Earth as a living system, we require deep and creative changes in our overall levels and patterns of living and consum­ing. Simplicity is not an alternative lifestyle for a marginal few. It is a creative choice for the mainstream majority, particularly in developed nations. If we are to pull together as a human commu­nity, it will be crucial for people in affluent nations to embrace a deep and sophisticated simplicity as a foundation for sustainabil­ity. Simplicity is simultaneously a personal choice, a community choice, a national choice, and a species choice.
What does a life of conscious simplicity look like? There is no cookbook we can turn to with easy recipes for the simple life. The world is moving into new territory and we are all inventing as we go. For more than thirty years I've explored contemporary expressions of the simple life and I've found such diversity that the most useful and accurate way of describing this approach to living may be with the metaphor of a garden.
A Garden of Simplicity
To portray the richness of simplicity, here are eight different flow­erings that I see growing in the "garden of simplicity." Although there is overlap among them, each expression of simplicity seems sufficiently distinct to warrant a separate category. These are pre­sented in no particular order, as all are important.
1. Uncluttered Simplicity: Simplicity means taking charge of lives that are too busy, too stressed, and too fragmented. Simplicity means cutting back on clut­ter, complications, and trivial distractions, both mate­rial and nonmaterial, and focusing on the essentials — whatever those may be for each of our unique lives. As Thoreau said, "Our life is frittered away by detail…. Simplify, simplify." Or, as Plato wrote, "In order to seek one's own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life."
2. Ecological Simplicity: Simplicity means choosing ways of living that touch the Earth more lightly and that reduce our ecological impact on the web of life. This life-path remembers our deep roots with the soil, air, and water. It encourages us to connect with na­ture, the seasons, and the cosmos. An ecological sim­plicity feels a deep reverence for the community of life on Earth and accepts that the nonhuman realms of plants and animals have their dignity and rights as well.
3. Family Simplicity: Simplicity means placing the well-being of one's family ahead of materialism and the acquisition of things. This expression of green liv­ing puts an emphasis on providing children with healthy role models living balanced lives that are not distorted by consumerism. Family simplicity affirms that what matters most in life is often invisible — the quality and integrity of our relationships with one an­other. Family simplicity is also intergenerational — it looks ahead and seeks to live with restraint so as to leave a healthy Earth for future generations.
4. Compassionate Simplicity: Simplicity means feel­ing such a strong sense of kinship with others that, as Gandhi said, we "choose to live simply so that oth­ers may simply live." A compassionate simplicity means feeling a bond with the community of life and being drawn toward a path of cooperation and fair­ness that seeks a future of mutually assured develop­ment for all.
5. Soulful Simplicity: Simplicity means approaching life as a meditation and cultivating our experience of direct connection with all that exists. By living simply, we can more easily awaken to the living universe that surrounds and sustains us, moment by moment. Soul­ful simplicity is more concerned with consciously tasting life in its unadorned richness than with a par­ticular standard or manner of material living. In culti­vating a soulful connection with life, we tend to look beyond surface appearances and bring our interior aliveness into relationships of all kinds.
6. Business Simplicity: Simplicity means that a new kind of economy is growing in the world, with healthy and sustainable products and services of all kinds (home-building materials, energy systems, food pro­duction, transportation). As the need for a sustainable infrastructure in developing nations is being com­bined with the need to retrofit and redesign the homes, cities, workplaces, and transportation systems of developed nations, it is generating an enormous wave of green business innovation and employment.
7. Civic Simplicity: Simplicity means that living more lightly and sustainably on the Earth requires changes in every area of public life — from public transporta­tion and education to the design of our cities and workplaces. The politics of simplicity is also a media politics, as the mass media are the primary vehicle for reinforcing — or transforming — the mass consciousness of consumerism. To realize the magnitude of changes required in such a brief time will require new approaches to governing ourselves at every scale.
8. Frugal Simplicity: Simplicity means that, by cutting back on spending that is not truly serving our lives, and by practicing skillful management of our per­sonal finances, we can achieve greater financial inde­pendence. Frugality and careful financial management bring increased financial freedom and the opportu­nity to more consciously choose our path through life. Living with less also decreases the impact of our consumption upon the Earth and frees resources for others.
As these eight approaches illustrate, the growing culture of simplicity contains a flourishing garden of expressions whose great diversity — and intertwined unity — are creating a resilient and hardy ecology of learning about how to live more sustainable and meaningful lives. As with other ecosystems, it is the diversity of expressions that fosters flexibility, adaptability, and resilience. Because there are so many pathways into the garden of simplic­ity, this self-organizing movement has enormous potential to grow....
The Choice for Simplicity
The circle has closed. The Earth is a single system and we humans have reached beyond its regenerative capacity. It is of the highest urgency that we invent new ways of living that are sus­tainable. The starting gun of history has already gone off and the time for creative action has arrived. With lifestyles of conscious simplicity, we can seek our riches in caring families and friend­ships, reverence for nature, meaningful work, exuberant play, social contribution, collaboration across generations, local com­munity, and creative arts. With conscious simplicity, we can seek lives that are rich with experiences, satisfaction, and learning rather than packed with things. With these new ingredients in the lives of our civilizations, we can redefine progress, awaken a new social consciousness, and establish a realistic foundation for a sustainable and promising future.
Excerpted with permission from Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. Copyright © 2010 by Duane Elgin. Published by Harper.

---

Reprinted with permission. The Center for Ecoliteracy where this article originally appeared, supports and advances education for sustainable living. You can follow its work at www.twitter.com/ecoliteracy. Duane Elgin is an internationally recognized speaker and author. His books include The Living Universe, Promise Ahead, and Awakening Earth. He received the international Goi Peace Award in recognition of his contribution to a global "vision, consciousness, and lifestyle" that fosters a "more sustainable and spiritual culture."

Circles...

Within the Orbit of Widening Circles - Photo by Katherine Minott  http://www.katherineminott.com/

This season of Lent has me thinking of circles.  As we make another pass through the liturgical year I experience again the familiar rhythm of this season, its signs and changes, a closing of winter, an inkling of undefined new things.  The ancient road of catholic discipline brings me again to this place of anticipation.  My two latest paintings were called Ancient Paths to New Creation.  They were the expression of what it is to be led by way of tradition, discipline, and faith in ordinary daily-ness to discoveries that surprise and change me.  This is where I am God's art.

I find myself coming full circle in more than one area of my life.  Being a surrogate mother to 13 year old Chayo is an unexpected joy and a weighty responsibility.  I am drawn to motherless children and I know its challenges, joys and heartaches well enough to want to be tempted to bolt, but here I am. 

A young friend who is pregnant is sharing her life with us and again I feel this as another circle coming to ripen.  Nearly forty years after birthing my son at home I find that I still have the impulse, impetus and enthusiasm for midwifery - not just the aspects of delivery, the care and preparation of becoming a mother and nurturing a developing baby, but the wonder-miracle and mystery of welcoming life.  I have become aware that I still carry seeds of longing in my body - that people I know be birthed into their own unique giftedness.  I meet my pregnant-self again as my friend shares her growing-self with us.

I am feeling the changes of aging and wondering the wisdom of pushing my body, hands and stamina to the brink.  It is soul-work to distill my energies, funneling them more deliberately in the direction of being true to what is important rather than what seems urgent.  This is a closing of a circle in the sense that I am re-turning to what is essential, clearing away the inner obstacles to what is calling me, refining/defining/divining me.

Lent begins every year with this scripture from Joel:   
“return to me with all your heart,
    with fasting and weeping and mourning.”

 Rend your heart
    and not your garments.
Return to the Lord your God,
    for he is gracious and compassionate"

Turning back with a whole heart, re-turning to God - whole-heartedness - isn't that a circle with a pinch at the top?  We start off with a whole heart and then stuff happens and over time the wholeness is shattered.  There's a piece I hold back for me, a piece I show to others, a piece that doesn't fit anymore, a piece that sort of looks like a heart if you squint your eyes.  Like Humpty-dumpty we think what is broken can never be made right again.   It's hard to look at wreckage, to re-member it and accept the losses and the grief.  In honest acceptance, followed by liberal compassion, the pieces integrate.  Mercy and truth meet,  justice and peace kiss, the circle closes - it's stretched larger, widening.
 
 I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
Book of Hours, I 2 by Rainer Maria Rilke

Feast of Epiphany

A Scene from The Nativity Story

The festivities of the Christmas season are winding down.  Chayo and Roberto returned to school today.   

As I drove Chayo down to the village in the morning darkness to catch the bus we were captivated by a bright star over the ocean.  Maybe it was the morning star. 

I thought of yesterday’s celebration of the magi and how they ventured out on an epic journey because of an extraordinary congruence of planets –  a pretty crazy idea. 

I watch for the star as I weave under the trees and cross the river into the village.  What star am I following?  What kind of crazy hope is my goal? 

Then I have an epiphany, and that is what the feast of the magi is called, Epiphany!  It means an appearance or manifestation.   What crazy kind of synchronization is this?

My epiphany is that I am on a journey and Christ, who is also called the Morning Star, is my Star; and the camel I’m riding is a radical, looney faith that is supposed to traverse this desert journey through a world gone mad.

I heard a song on the radio the other day and the refrain, “a heart full of hope”, resonated in me.  I thought, Hey, it feels good to have gotten this old and to still feel this way. 

It turns out that the lyrics are “a heart full of holes".  That could have been my song too but my heart is pretty well patched.

As I opened the gate to return to the house I had another epiphany. It came on slow like the dawn's light coming over the mountain.  It feels right to have Chayo in our lives.  It’s crazy too.  We had different ideas for slow-living but I find myself softened to what is happening, open to something-someone we hadn’t even thought to ask for.   

The image of following a star is how I enter the New Year. We all have eyes on the horizon of the morning sky to see what light rises to illuminate the way ahead. I am feeling tremendously grateful for a sense of joy and anticipation over what is coming this year.

May a star rise above you to guide you through this year too.  May you have a feast of epiphanies, new ways of seeing the things that are already true and on their way to you. 

This has been our Advent...

Chayo, after baptism yesterday

Beuatiful Roberto and friend of the family, Katya

The last post was the beginning of the Advent season.  The recent weeks since then have been full and rich.  It has been a time of preparation and also of waiting and that is what is meant by Advent. 

Specifically, we have been preparing for Chayo and Roberto's baptism.  This is a process that began back in February and propelled us into a new career, that of being spiritual parents.  Wally and I were earnest in assuming this for Leah, our 2 year old goddaughter, but then there were her older brother and sister who were floundering in the aftermath of their mother's death.  The answer at the time seemed to be the church, the center of life in their village.  The church could become the family and structure that they were lacking.  That's where we began this journey.  Chayo and Robert wanted to be baptized but they had not been to catechism which begins when children are 6.  They were too old to join the classes but the priest said that if they were to be tutored and tested monthly, that if they came to mass weekly, that he would baptize them.  So I said I would do it.  Had I given it a lot of consideration I would have had plenty of reasons to find someone better suited.  I hate to drive, I hate to leave my home, I don't speak Spanish well enough for exegesis and I already have a full-time occupation on the farm, but everything in me said "YES".  So we began meeting each week for study and again for mass and at the end of each month we met with the priest.  In these months of preparation we have been knit together.  We have grown famil-y-ar.  We are family now.

Earlier this week in preparation for their baptism they made their confession.  As I sat in the back of the church looking at the backs of their heads, the way they leaned forward to listen and speak to the priest, how beauty rested gently on them, I saw them through their mother's eyes.   I felt the fullness of hope and expectation.   I felt peace.

The baptism was a concentrated gathering:  the priest, Chayo, Roberto, their father and grandfather and us, the god-parents.   It was a perfect coming together that tied the yarn off of what had become accomplished. It was good.

Each week in Advent a candle is lit to represent an aspect of preparation for the coming of the Messiah.  Last Sunday the pink candle of joy was lit.  Before that the candles of hope and love, and this Sunday, the final week, peace.  As a whole, these candles represent the coming of light into the world. 

This has been our Advent experience.

Advent - a meditation on hope

The Annunciation by Henry O. Tanner

This painting moves me.  I have a book of paintings of the Annunciation.  I am drawn to the renderings of something so powerful and mysterious as an encounter with a call to purpose.  There is no inkling of the cost.  It is the beginning of great and terrible expectations, a swelling of spirit.  I particularly love this painting because it shows Mary of Nazareth as a teenager, just awakened from sleep and on the brink of saying "yes" to God.  How far and deep that "yes" would resonate began in one awe-full moment. 

How can anyone know what is ahead.  This is how I am feeling these days.  I am waking up to a compressed longing  for things to be better in the world and in particular for a few loved ones.  Perhaps the answer is in timing, like pregnancy.  Things are ready when there is ripening.  So much has to happen and be coordinated and that is where the waiting and expectation come into play.  First there has to be hope and then there is preparation with the expectation that it will come to pass.  

I am having a baby shower for something birthing in my soul...I don't know what the baby is yet, but I feel this stirring anticipation.  I want to be ready, I want it to be good so there's preparation: cleaning, beautifying, refining, joy to cultivate into booties for my hope when it comes.

Yesterday I heard of a woman giving birth 4 weeks early.  The baby was taken by caesarean because of fetal distress.  The mother hadn't been eating and she and the baby were dehydrated.  The baby was long but very low in weight and having to start its fragile life in an incubator.

Is this what happens when we don't care for our hope, does it slow the time of ripening, could it shrivel to death?  Doesn't hope, like a fetus, depend on daily nurturing?

And this makes me wonder:    is this what is lacking and why the world is not getting better?   s the second Advent on hold for more hope-ers so that the world's hope can ripen? 

Wait, hope and see. 

Thanksgiving

Another Thanksgiving - how comforting to make another cycle around another year and we are still here, still thankful.  I hope this is how you are feeling too.  It is the simple daily blessings that nurture us and keep our hearts topped off with gratitude.  God's ways are so perfect:  with the overflow of thanks we become givers ourselves and grace overflows onto others making more thanksgiving.  I imagine that this is what is meant by Glory, that God's goodness is perpetual.

This has been a good year with the farm growing in ways that we can see and enjoy.  The trees are maturing and making flowers and fruit.  Wally made an addition to our guest house and made it so much nicer.  We made changes to our house too, making our living room into an art studio for me and a bedroom for our god daughter, Chayo - yes, our family has grown too.  A new source of water coming from the mountains and crossing our land has been another great blessing.  In fact, this has been a year of expansion.  We are feeling a kind of happy anticipation but we don't know what could be ahead, only that now is full and we are thankful.

New art studio

Studio and Chayo's room - a shared space

Wally has become the go-to-guy for everything that doesn't work in the gringo community.  That keeps him on a learning curve with man's high- tech toys.  If he isn't familiar with it he figures it out by studying it on the internet and now he often knows more than the experts because his experience is much broader and hands-on.  I am exceedingly proud of him because I see him behind the scenes teaching himself how to repair and rebuild things better.  From computers and satellite antennas to converting his fuel-injected Porsche to a basic carburetor - he always sees how things could be better.  But then he is a special genius.

My week has a more predictable routine.  I pick up Chayo for the weekend on Friday.  Saturday we prepare for selling at the farmer's market which is every Sunday morning and attend church.  I am teaching Chayo about finances through a hair bow business.  She works long hours making beautiful bows while I bake and she sells them along side my cakes at the farmer's market.   On Monday I take her to the school bus and then later in the afternoon I teach catechism to 10 lively kids between the ages of 12 and 14. 

December will be a busy month.  Christmas is celebrated in a big way throughout Advent and also Chayo and her brother,Robert will be baptized on the 19th.  There are extra church and school activities too and our tradition of gifts for the children on our road. 

 

Today we had a new young veterinarian come from San Blas to treat all 10 dogs and surgically care for a large hematoma on the ear of Sparky.  It is not the first time or the last that my dining table has doubled for surgery.  Dr. Marcos volunteered as a surgeon for a couple of our monthly clinics so I had assisted him before.  It would be maddening to take 10 dogs for a visit to a vet.  This is a great new development and I feel the prospects of a lasting friendship growing.

And so we are looking to a new year with hope and expectation.  Which is what we wish for you.  Savor this season.   I end with a poem:

  

Thanksgiving

 
I have been trying to read
the script cut in these hills—
a language carved in the shimmer of stubble
and the solid lines of soil, spoken
in the thud of apples falling
and the rasp of corn stalks finally bare.

The pheasants shout it with a rusty creak
as they gather in the fallen grain,
the blackbirds sing it over their shoulders in parting,
and gold leaf illuminates the manuscript
where it is written in the trees.

Transcribed onto my human tongue
I believe it might sound like a lullaby,
or the simplest grace at table.
across the gathering stillness
simply this: “For all that we have received,
dear God, make us truly grateful.”. 

---Lynn Ungar,  Bread and Other Miracles
 

Joining the saints...

I have been experiencing life very intensely lately.  It is a combination of the loss of close companions and relatives in juxtaposition with the lively, lovable, presence of Chayo, our 13 year old goddaughter and Leah, her 2 year old sister.  I am simultaneously letting go and embracing something new.  The letting go is not the easy part.  I don't want to rush forward.  I want to take time, contemplate and sit and savor what these precious ones gave to me and I want to find new ways to live with them so that they live on in my life, inspiring me to live beauti-fully and in that way be a living memorial.  Henri J. M. Nouwen wrote in Bread for the Journey:

"As we grow older we have more and more people to remember, people who have died before us. It is very important to remember those who have loved us and those we have loved. Remembering them means letting their spirits inspire us in our daily lives. They can become part of our spiritual communities and gently help us as we make decisions on our journeys. Parents, spouses, children, and friends can become true spiritual companions after they have died. Sometimes they can become even more intimate to us after death than when they were with us in life. Remembering the dead is choosing their ongoing companionship."
 
This week we celebrated the Day of the Dead, or All Saints Day, an important solemnity in the Catholic church and in the culture of Mexico.  It was a good opportunity to reach out to Chayo in regard to the death of her mother.  A couple weeks earlier I had made a memorial in our home to honor my uncle Toshi who passed on October 20th. So the week before November 2, I added photos of Chayo's mother's along with photos of my father, my beloved old dogs, and my friend Jeanne.  I had gathered a few other meaningful things to add to the altar.  I wanted to show Chayo how we can use symbols for what is intangible as ways of honoring and staying present to the real.  It is also satisfying and comforting to express ourselves with these meaningful tablescapes.  In my house, they change and move like seasons, they speak life and lessons to me.

My family in Japan is closing the residence of my grandmother and this is another "letting go".  It is an exercise similar to painting from memory.  I train my eyes to take in as much information as I can hold and then commit it to a multi sensational impression in my cells - light, color, shape, composition, mood, feeling, taste, sound.  This is something that moth and mold cannot destroy and can always be revisited to savor over and over again...much better than a photo. 


This is what I hope to pass on to Chayo:  the awareness that we are shaped by others -  good and bad.  We know the bad is there, but we can be deliberate in concentrating the good and develop, celebrate and honor that.  

We are a complex brew of tea.  We are deepened and enriched as we steep in the qualities and characteristics of the ones who loved us.  We are tea to be savored, giving back in our way what others have added to our lives.  When we do we become fully ourselves.  We move into our own sainthood.

I like how Christine Valters Paintner expresses it:   "To become a Saint doesn't mean to be some contrived image of holiness, practicing your faith in ways that imitate others, but to find your own unique expression in the world. You are a revelation of the sacred, and there is only one revelation just like you."