Day: July 5, 2015

“I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.”
— Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, 27 March 1848

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I have no desire to live alone for a year or so on a pond and hunt squirrels and eat fish. I like living with a soul-mate and partner. I like loving her and being loved. Yet Henry David Thoreau has always been a powerful influence on me, he has always haunted me, challenged me to live a simpler life. Thomas Merton was a different kind of influence on me, he inspired me to leave behind my urban and suburban life and take a great leap of faith, to come to the country to live in nature and seek out a life that was contemplative and spiritual.

Armed with a carload of his books and journals, I came up to my cabin and spent a year mostly by myself, and I was forever changed. That was the first step on my hero journey, into light and darkness and confusion and glory.

I have been more successful following Merton’s guide than Thoreau’s sometimes. Spirituality is ephemeral, I think you never get there, the point is to stay on the path. My life is more spiritual. I meditate, live in nature, learn from the animals.  In our culture, and in our time, our lives are frantic and cluttered. Thoreau’s message rings much more true today that it even did in his time, especially around Independence Day, where we sometimes are asked to think about where are country is headed.

We seem headed for stress, complexity and waste. It is no longer possible to even consider the simple life that Thoreau lived for a year and that he urged others to live. Could any of us live for a year without our Iphones?

Lenin said the point of a capitalist culture was to create a continuing supply of things we are told we must have and that we need, he estimated that we don’t need 90 per cent of the things we think we need to buy, or that capitalism creatures to feed the corporate beast. Pope Francis had added a new sense of urgency about waste: “We know that it is impossible to sustain the current level of consumption in the more developed countries and the wealthiest parts of society, where the habit of waste and of throwing things away is reaching unprecedented levels. Already we have exceeded certain limits of exploiting the planet, without solving the problem of poverty.”

Or the limits of simplicity and peace of mind. Heal our lives, says the Pope, heal our planet.

I have a lot of challenges to face still in my life, it’s shadows of time shortening every day. I have to heal my financial struggles and wounds, I wish to live a simpler life. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity, said Thoreau. What do we really need? And what is a simpler life anyway?

Is it a poorer life? A life without so many pills and prescriptions and tests? A life with fewer devices and less time spent on them? A life in nature? With more animals around, and fewer things?

I see my own life getting forever more complicated as well as wasteful. I am wired into a number of devices that help me share my creativity, do my work, and earn a living. I am bombarded with things I do not really need – special offerings, subscriptions, technological updates.

I went to the pet store last week to buy chew toys and bones for Fate, who is teething with border collie intensity. I found myself at the cashier with $67 worth of things for her to chew.

For most of my life, I would simply swiped the credit card, but I stopped and asked myself what I really needed to get for her, and I put $40 or so back. She is chewing happily. The move to simplicity is stirring. I saw three new books in the bookstore, and bought one of them. I buy clothes once a year, two pairs of jeans, five shirts,  two sets of suspenders. I am learning to manage the new world of technology and social media.  I never argue my writings online, I check my messages two or three times a day, not 20 or 30, I do not exchange personal messages with people I do not know, I do not seek or accept advice from strangers. I am cooking vegetables and healthy and simple things for me to eat, and in smaller portions, good for my body, good for my soul.

I am  increasingly fond of my Kindle, not only can I read it at night and in bed, but I can store my books there. Thoreau, says the New York Times, was the country’s first “De-Clutterer,” but I suspect de-cluttering, like rationality and concern for the poor and tolerance for other humans, is catching on.I like Thoreau’s term better: simplify.  But it is hard in our kind of culture to simplify. Our world depends on greed, fear and need. Lenin was right, capitalism depends on manipulating people into buying things they don’t need, corporations that don’t squeeze every drop of blood from a stone are considered failures, their leaders and workers gutted.

We need this plan or that, expensive health care plans, soul-sucking jobs we hate in places we don’t wish to live so we can get more insurance and put more money into our IRA’s and live empty lives in the forgotten warehouses of the aged.

I am serious about simplfying my life. It is easier when you have done most of your big buying in life.  Older people tend to be forgotten in a corporate world, they don’t have too many years of buying power left, it is the young who are brutally ensnared in debt, obligation, and fear about the future.  They have many years ahead of them where they are told they will need to buy things – houses, cars, computers, watches, plans and investments. Our lives get more complicated every single day and I am learning to say no more and more.  I want a simpler life, with fewer things to manage, fewer phone trees to call, fewer bills to manage, fewer passwords to try and store.

I was frightened when I lost all of my money a few years ago, it was swept away by the recession, my divorce and the end of publishing as I knew it. A friend  on Wall Street told me I was one of the lucky ones, I could live a simpler life, he said, I had nothing to lose. I was now in the driver’s  seat. I don’t know if he was right, but the idea stuck in my consciousness. I realized that Thoreau said the same thing many times.

Simplicity is good for the soul. Our culture is addicted to sometimes mindless connection, we are drowning in more information than we can handle, learning to make friends that we will never know or see, struggling to manage more devices than we can understand or figure out how to plug in,  angered by the endless for profit rain of violent and disturbing news and imagery. We are stressed and angry and frightened and overwhelmed, the very antithesis of Thoreau’s idea.  Even the weather has become a source of alarm for the greed corporations who need us to be frightened so we will pay attention to them.

We need to think, but we have  no time and space to think, only to react to what other people are telling us to think. The New York Times called Thoreau a “domestic minimalist,” but I think he was a psychic and a seer. He saw the trap succeeding generations were setting for themselves, he urged us not to fall into it. But we have. And so now, a great movement to simply our lives begin, fueled by our own wishes for meaning and peace, and a powerful new motive: the fate of the earth. The Pope is right, we have no right to use up the resources of the earth at the expense of the poor.

The challenge for me is to live more simply, and more authentically. To simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real.  To acquire fewer things that need to be thrown away. This is seminal part of the hero journey, I will share the trip.

I take training seriously, I believe in never giving any command I can’t carry through on, or make the dog obey. I make Fate sit, lie down and stay every time she leaves the house, goes to the pasture, eats her food. I am no hard-ass but I pride myself on being consistent and clear, and asserting my leadership continuously. I don’t have push dogs, they never leave a room or go out a door before me. And I have a dog, Red, who never misbehaves and is eager to obey any command instantly.

I look away at few things, I take training very seriously…But, you can’t take life all that seriously around a dog like Fate.

Fate is a different animal than Red, she is feisty, independent,  headstrong, ingenious and intensely curious. Today I came into the kitchen and saw that she had gone into the bathroom, discovered a roll of toilet paper and had a good time pulling on it and bring the paper out into the kitchen. She looked slightly guilty, I think she knew this was a no-no, but she was willing to take the heat, as she often is.

I was going to correct her, to say “no” sharply and take the paper away, but I just didn’t have the heart. Sometimes this dog is just too cute, I cracked up and laughed and she ran over to me, tail wagging, and I picked her up and gave her a kiss on the nose.

Fate is such a good dog, she works so hard and learns so much, I just couldn’t scold or even correct her. Sometimes she brings out the wuss in me.

Hanging planters are a world unto themselves, I see them as a private universe of color and connection, a space for me to enter with my lens and get lost in, like the meadow.

A breakthrough today, the sheep took off out of the pasture, and I yelled “Fate, Get The Sheep!,” and it was kind of thrilling to see her take off after them, and then a few minutes later, see them come charging down the hill and back into the pasture, Fate close behind. She is not quite big enough or confident enough to herd them if they challenge her, but it won’t be long. This was a great evolution, an exciting thing to see, a neat thing to capture.

For me, creativity is not about having  hobbies, doing puzzles, painting a water color on vacation every year or so. Creativity is the essential expression of the human spirit, the rising of the soul, the essence of identity, the great equalizer,  the source of one’s truth. Psychiatrists and psychologists and spiritualists know this, there is nothing more healing or affirming than creativity.

Yet in our culture, creativity, like compassion and spirituality and peace, is pushed to the margins of our lives, not the center. It is never mentioned on cable news, or emphasized in college,  or spoken of in Congress or from podiums at the White House or on the front pages of newspapers and blogs.  It is not considered important, like making money or war.

I began to find myself, to come of age, to free my own spirit when I came to understand that creativity is not an interruption of life or work, it is the the work. It is not at the edge of my life, but at the center, and through the evolution of the creative spark, God’s gift to every human being, I have begun the arduous and glorious task of living my life in a meaningful way. I believe Maria is on the same path.

In her  book Women Who Run With The Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes that creativity is essential to the identity of human beings, especially of women. Yet sadly, she says, most of her patients tell her they simply don’t have time to be creative. I have experienced this again and again in my teaching and communications with people, even the most gifted,  who say they wish to be creative. Start a blog, I say, do a journal, write a poem,  look inward and free the powerful voices and spirits inside of you that want to come out.

Mostly, they do not believe me.

Oh, they say, easy for you to say, you are creative,  you are a writer. I don’t have time. I am too busy. I can’t afford it. I have a mortgage, kids going to college, parents who are sick, children to drive around, bills to pay. I can’t be creative. It is not for me to tell other people what to do or how to live, but I always think the same thing. You don’t have time to not be creative.

In her consulting room, says Estes, she has watched as certain poets toss their pages of work onto the sofa as though their poetry were refuse rather than treasure. She has seen artists bring their paintings to session, banging them against the door frame on their way in. She has, she says, seen the green gleam in women’s eyes as they try to disguise their anger that others seem able to create and that they themselves, for some reason, cannot.

Reading Estes words, I shook a bit, felt a chill. I have heard this so many times, seen this so many times, it is a painful and wonderful thing to read, it is a tough thing to see and hear. I tell every student I teach to never speak poorly of their creativity or their work, it is listening.

“I have heard all the excuses that any woman might knit up,” writes Estes. “I’m not talented. I’m not important. I’m not educated. I have no ideas. I don’t know how. I don’t know what. And the most scurrilous of all: I don’t have time. I always want to shake them upside down until they repent and promise to never tell falsehoods again. But I don’t have to shake them up, for the dark man in dreams will do that, and if not he, then another dream actor will.”

It is a good lesson for men, for women, for me. I hear the excuses all the time, I can’t shake them upside down, they often lie to me when they promise never to tell falsehoods about themselves again. But I know that Estes is correct when she says it is not really the business of the teacher to bully, the dark men in dreams will be there to do that instead. But still, I want to grab them by the shoulders and say your stories are important, you have ideas, you don’t need a formal education, life is the great teacher, and you always have time if you open your eyes and awaken to the true nature of life.