Twelve By Twelve Part 6

We walked on. Another mile, then two, and I felt something catch in my chest, beyond the budding romance with Leah. Is there any limit to what I, what she, what we humans could become? I felt a sense of awe, as if all of my former boundaries had melted and I was now a pile of clay ready for molding.

Back at the 12 12, we lit the candles and cooked up a stir-fry with freshly picked s.h.i.+take mushrooms, sipped heirloom tea, and entered into a kind of stillness that I thought was possible only in solitude. It was cool outside; the full moon lit up some dark gray clouds pa.s.sing over. We heard the first spring frogs calling, and some cicadas, and saw Venus through the window. I was thinking about Jackie; she'd emailed me from her Nevada desert peace walk and dropped a hint that a big change was afoot in her life. I wondered what it was. And then I wasn't thinking about anything at all.

"There's a roominess to the present moment," Leah said. We lapsed back into silence for the longest time. Actually we had little conception of time. Sitting there in Jackie's goosehead rocker, hearing the slightest bubbling of the creek, I entered into a kind of trance.

I felt the house and me overlap with a click; we fell into place together, fitting each other like shoehorn on heel. A similar thing would happen again several times when I was alone in the 12 12 at night. But on this, the first time, with Leah, I felt a s.h.i.+ver. Most of the time, of course, I was just in the little house cooking, baking, writing, dressing, sleeping, marveling at the sky through the window. But then it would happen, suddenly, on the rocker: I feel the house living inside me I feel the house living inside me. Not metaphorically, but actually inside me, doing house things like warming, illuminating, freezing, getting dirty, getting clean, boiling, baking, inspiring, being still. Grounded, but stretching a little toward heaven. Breathing through a flung-open window or door, breathing through my mouth. Inside me.

I was somewhere else. Nowhere, with a tiny house in there. Leah had a look on her face at once bewildered and astonished. She whispered, "Did you feel that?"

I did, and I still do. That's the One Life about which words are only signposts. It's the other world inside of this one, the place beyond contradictions. Are we to find the fullness of life in more things, in faster food and bigger shopping malls? Or is it to be found in the still, the small, the radical present?

PART II.

TWELVE.

13. CREATIVE EDGES.

WHAT'S THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD?

Looking at baby lettuce coming up, the smell of fresh, loamy soil saturating my nostrils, and feeling around at the dewy base of the lettuce for weeds to release, I burst out laughing. An all-out guffaw. It's the wrong question. When the Aymara philosopher Honamti told me, by the blue sh.o.r.es of Lake t.i.ticaca, that the earth was round up into the heavens, round out to the horizon, and round into our inner selves, he was actually trying to destroy the idea of roundness. His trinity of circles - up, out, in - is an allegory meant to smash the idea of our earth as any geometrical shape at all. It's not flat, nor is it, in any lived sense, round. So what is it?

Perhaps the world is not shape but rhythm. As my laughter died, I could hear something in the wind in the trees above; the slightly discordant bubble-gurgle of the creek; the peck-peck-peck of a giant woodp.e.c.k.e.r over the low baseline of buzzing bees in their hives. The search for a meaningful life is the search for the right chord, getting our rhythm in tune with the cosmic jazz improvised all around us. It's not a national anthem, a pop song, or a tired waltz. It's music that dances unpredictably with the silence all around it, that's a little off-key. The Russian philosopher and composer Gurdjieff talks about the Rule of Seven, where all of our lives metaphorically play out along a scale of seven notes, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti at first, but with one or two of the notes always changing, throwing the music into a constantly unstable state. This creates the problems of the world, which are then temporarily solved in the next bar of music. We're germinated to a rhythm; our mother's heartbeat is a conga drum beating beneath our racing little dot of a heart as our limbs, face, and fingernails take shape. It's that beat that we lose when we come out of her.

A year after I left the 12 12, I returned to No Name Creek, and Jackie and I stood outside one night under the stars. They s.h.i.+mmered in the sky and on the creek. She left me alone for a minute, disappearing into the 12 12, and then returned with a pair of everyday binoculars and handed them to me. What could I possibly see out here on such a dark night? What could I possibly see out here on such a dark night? I thought. Jackie pointed into the sky, toward Orion's knife. I thought. Jackie pointed into the sky, toward Orion's knife.

I chuckled at the absurdity. Without a telescope, what could I possibly see? Nevertheless, I humored her, pointing the low-tech binoculars up at Orion's bow. I traced the clear belt of three stars and then saw the weapon at his side, three dimmer stars, his knife. I squinted through the lens; nothing special. It hardly seemed to magnify anything. Looking at Jackie for help, I noticed her smiling. "Focus on the middle star in the knife," she said.

I looked again. Remarkably, the point of that middle star loosened, blurred as if the lens were smeared. Puzzled, I relaxed my gaze and allowed the image to reveal itself. It wasn't a star at all, but a nebula of stars.

"It's the Orion nebula," Jackie said, "an interstellar cloud of hydrogen gas, dust, and plasma." She explained that it's a star-forming region, where materials clump together to form bigger ma.s.ses that further attract matter and eventually become stars. "The 'leftovers' are believed to form planets," she said. "So it's not a single star, but a million pieces of a future star."

That nebula is a metaphor for Jackie's effect on me. What before looked like one single thing was actually a million. Edges of the ordinary blurred.

There's a rare and puzzling condition called synesthesia where your senses, in effect, cross. Swiss musician Elizabeth Sulston, for example, hears pleasant chords as the taste of sweet cream. Dissonant, grating chords taste bitter. Sulston, according to a study published in Nature Nature, is the first known case mixing sound and taste. Much more common is the blurring of sound and sight, where, for example, the sound of a birdcall "looks blue." Scientists believe the condition originates in the limbic system, a primitive region of the brain a.s.sociated with behavior and emotion. Even more fascinating, studies on infants suggest that we all start out as synesthetes, but soon after birth, neural circuits are pruned and we lose this ability. "It's not a short circuit in the system," neurologist Richard Cytowic is quoted as saying, "but a primitive mechanism that was somehow lost to the rest of us."

When the middle star of Orion's knife fell apart through Jackie's binoculars, I could practically hear the soft rain of a didgeridoo. I'm no synesthete, but coming into nature, into solitude, at the 12 12 broke down boundaries for me, including the boundary between the supposedly distinct five senses. They blurred together at times, forging music. Jackie is a scientist, of course, but she approaches nature with a creative eye rather than a dissecting one. Do this, and you enter a convergent world, where things fit together in fresh ways, rather than a divergent one, where an impatient eye dissects reality to intellectual minutia. I was allergic to hard science at school, but while at the 12 12 I opened the scientific books on her shelf - geology, hydrology, organic chemistry, astronomy, plant biology - and the landscape around the tiny house deepened exponentially like cells dividing. Underground rivers surged through channels a hundred yards under the 12 12; the Jack grapes out the window turned sunlight into energy and exhaled the oxygen I breathed; the compost pile chomped up old straw, tough vegetable stems, and hedge clippings and made soil; the night sky, seen so gloriously with the absence of electricity at her house, became theater. "There's the cup," she told me, "and that star is the constellation's only named star: Alkes Alkes. And over there" - she pointed to a spot above No Name Creek - "is the bear driver, which Homer mentions in his Odyssey Odyssey."

At Jackie's, the edges of the "hard" sciences blurred together, and this is exactly where permaculture occurs. One of the books I discovered on Jackie's shelf was Bill Mollison's Permaculture: A Designer's Manual Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, which has sold over a hundred thousand copies, suggesting to me how much the phenomenon is spreading. In a chapter called "Edges," Mollison explains that the edges between ecosystems - for instance, between water and land or a hill and flatland - hold more variety than the middle. This is because they're transition zones where unique and diverse life can flourish, such as amphibians that straddle aquatic and terrestrial areas. Home and farm become sculpture you gently shape, consciously cultivating additional edges, and therefore more richness, diversity, and surprise. Jackie, for instance, created a pond among her beds to foster more edges, resulting in frogs, insects, and aquatic plants. Likewise, I remember puzzling during my first earth mentors.h.i.+p with Stan Crawford in New Mexico over how to combine hydrology and biology so as to grow crops most effectively in that dry climate. The solution: I planted my blue corn in the furrows and not on the mounds, where they'd capture more of the scarce rainfall. And so on. Permaculture isn't industrial agriculture; it's art and music afield.

FINALLY, I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY to visit the Pauls, a fatherson team who'd left a comfortable suburban life near Philadelphia to wildcraft in Adams County. Jackie wrote to me about them: "The Pauls (Sr. and Jr.) are finis.h.i.+ng up three 12 12s, much more elaborate than mine, but they have more money than I do. They have thirty-two acres about five miles from me. You might visit them. They're just starting." to visit the Pauls, a fatherson team who'd left a comfortable suburban life near Philadelphia to wildcraft in Adams County. Jackie wrote to me about them: "The Pauls (Sr. and Jr.) are finis.h.i.+ng up three 12 12s, much more elaborate than mine, but they have more money than I do. They have thirty-two acres about five miles from me. You might visit them. They're just starting."

As I pedaled along the Pauls' half-mile dirt drive, their small pasture and vast woods opened up to me. They were to be the first people to live on this land, at least in modern times. The silence was immense. Out toward the edge were three 12 12s, the only structures on this vast property. I had that African safari feeling all of a sudden, of being in the middle of the veldt, as if a large mammal - antelope, zebra, rhino, hippo - could burst forth at any moment.

As I got closer and parked my bike, I took a closer look at the 12 12s; their rooftops stood taller than Jackie's, and they had larger front and back porches. In fact, each of the porches had as much square footage as the entire house. I was dying to peek inside, and almost did, when I spotted an older man waddling out of the forest. "I'm Paul," he said, his handshake much more vigorous than I expected. "Paul Sr., that is. Paul Jr. is dealing with a minor disaster." He was sixty-seven, a retired American studies and religion professor from a Pennsylvania college. Paul Sr. reminded me of photos I'd seen of Robert Frost in his later years: waifish, stooped, distinguished.

We toured the 12 12s. Instead of Jackie's simple ladder, they contained actual stairways heading up to s.p.a.cious lofts. Paul Sr. explained that he and his son would each live in one of them "in Benedictine monastic style," and the third would be for guests, friends, and spiritually inclined pilgrims alike. He said that he and his son rose at three A.M. every morning for contemplative prayer. Though I might have expected a scholar and ascetic like Paul Sr. to be aloof, he came across as downright jolly.

Paul Jr. ran up to us, panting and rubbing his shaved head. "It's worse than we thought!" A particularly fierce storm the previous night had uprooted many of their young strawberries, beans, and other crops. Several of their newly planted fruit trees lay on their sides, toppled by the storm.

In concerned tones, they discussed the damage as we walked from the open fields into the forest, toward their stretch of river, but as we got deeper into the woods, we all became so engrossed in the gorgeous canopy overhead, the birdlife, the blooming flora, that their stress faded away. Paul Jr. picked wild pokeweed out of the ground for the evening's salad. It seemed that every newly sprouting leaf hadn't been there when they'd walked through just a week before. Paul Sr. would pop every other leaf into his mouth, his big blue eyes reflecting the taste - bitter, sweet, tart. I asked him if he didn't worry about eating something poisonous. He said, "Bradley taught us that there's only one plant out here that will kill you, wild hemlock, and I know what that looks like." They said they'd taken Bradley's permaculture course at the community college and attended several of his lectures. Bradley's contracting firm was building their 12 12s.

"Look!" Paul Jr. exclaimed. A natural bridge had formed when a tree crashed down across their lovely river during last night's storm. He scampered across it and waved at us with both arms from the other side. Then he disappeared into the forest beyond, in search of herbs for dinner. Paul Sr. muttered something about edible mushrooms and walked along the brook's bank in the other direction.

I could hear the sound of a hawk's wings slicing the air above; the river's rush, a buzzing b.u.mblebee, and the rustle of an unseen animal in the middle distance. I walked the path the other way along the river, listening to the music around me, feeling an excitement with the Pauls similar to what I felt the very first time I experienced an earth-centered culture - in another forest, down in Guatemala.

In 1994, I volunteered for a month in a remote Mam Mayan community. I stepped out of the bus in Cabrican, where I was met by Raul, a Mayan man and local schoolteacher who was to be my host. Through my twenty-two-year-old eyes, the lightly touched landscape seemed alive; it was Gaia, the animate earth that philosophers talked about in my undergraduate anthropology cla.s.s.

I lived with Raul and his family for a month, constructing fuelsaving ovens and lending a hand with house building and even smallscale silver mining. I noticed, amazingly, that folks only worked, on average, the equivalent of half a day. I learned a bit of Mam Mayan. But it was a small detail that impressed me, a child of suburbia, more than anything else: the footpaths.

Like the ones through the Pauls' property, the Mam footpaths wound through the woods with little allegiance to efficiency. They bent, looped, and curved playfully. The Maya considered the paths to be sacred, alive somehow, and imbued with greater life with the walking. n.o.body had cars, and the bus I came in on only arrived about once a week. So we used our feet, onward to the outdoor market, the fields, the mine, the forest; untidy dirt paths, intersecting with other dirt paths. Often a rhythm would accompany our walk: a chanted tune, a kind of a Mayan-language mantra. We'd walk slowly, always, enjoying ourselves as much as getting anywhere.

Later, in Africa, I heard the story of a pair of African porters who were hired by a Belgian trader to walk with him deep into the forest towns in search of one commodity or another. After two days of brisk walking, the porters sat down on the ground and refused to budge. The trader first demanded they walk, then tried sweet-talking, and finally offered them an increase in salary - after all, time was money! No matter what he tried, they wouldn't move. Finally the porters explained: they'd been walking too fast, and they now had to stop to wait for their souls to catch up.

Along the Mayan footpaths, along No Name Creek, and along the Pauls' trails, I felt the way those porters did. That slow, considered pace allows your soul to walk with you. At the Pauls', I stopped on a footpath, their 12 12s barely visible through the foliage, to observe a coc.o.o.n on a twig. In the organic broth inside a coc.o.o.n, the organs of the new creature emerge with the pulse of a new heartbeat. Growth in nature happens not in a linear manner but rather through a series of pulsations. Growth is gentle; it reaches out tentatively into new terrain. This quote from Rumi captivates me: "Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings."

AFTER OUR WALK, I sat with the Pauls in the middle of a large circular garden beside their 12 12s. They had inlaid their garden, a full acre in size, with a Christian cross of gra.s.s, which split the round acre into four parts, Native American-style. Paul Sr. explained the interwoven religious tapestry and talked about Teilhard de Chardin's animistic idea that "consciousness shoots through everything" - even the rocks and river. I sat with the Pauls in the middle of a large circular garden beside their 12 12s. They had inlaid their garden, a full acre in size, with a Christian cross of gra.s.s, which split the round acre into four parts, Native American-style. Paul Sr. explained the interwoven religious tapestry and talked about Teilhard de Chardin's animistic idea that "consciousness shoots through everything" - even the rocks and river.

"It's not shooting through your plants anymore," I tried to joke, a reference to the storm-affected plants all around us.

"A disaster," Paul Jr. lamented. "It's the Greek G.o.d Deinos. Did you know the word itself, Deinos Deinos, is a combination of fear and love?"

"The literal translation is 'terrible lizard,' " his father noted.

Suddenly a deer, which looked incredibly vivid against the blue sky, turned and leapt away from us in a flash of brown and white tail. The Pauls got excited. It was the first time a deer had wandered so close to their circular acre. I imagined the deer munching up the remainder of their veggies, but they called it "a fortuitous sign from Deinos."

I couldn't help feeling, in that moment, that the Pauls seemed a tad naive. They had lived in urban environments for most of their lives, and their cerebral musings struck an ironic backdrop against the damaged crops in their field. They were trying, like Jackie, to build lives on the creative edge, in convergence with the earth. But if they were naive about the task they'd set for themselves, they certainly weren't being destructive. How often, in fact, did a desire for growth lead to destruction? I thought of Howard Schultz, chairman of Starbucks, who - when asked why it was so important to him that the company grow so rapidly - responded that if he didn't do it "Starbucks would be cannibalized by another chain that would wipe it out." Relentless growth was a more powerful force for him than his coffee. In a memo, he complained that his company's compet.i.tors were going after Starbucks customers. The startling words he used in that memo: "This must be eradicated."

"Eradicate" and "cannibalize" didn't figure into the Pauls' vocabulary, as they attempted to sculpt lives that, like the Maya's, blended with Gaia. But it is hard to escape our internal colonization, I thought, as I noticed the increasingly anxious looks on the Pauls' faces. They weren't unaware of their frost-bitten disaster. But more than that there was a vast, raw land around them. They wanted to do things! Build things! Cut trails, dam part of the river for a bigger swimming area, and as Paul Sr. said, "put a hundred sheep out here." A slightly horrific vision formed in my mind of their farm five years hence: not this perfectly raw, deer-filled, wild s.p.a.ce, but a domesticated pastoral idyll with a summer camp feel. The Pauls would show people around and describe the present moment as those terrible days "when there was absolutely nothing here."

I recognized this as a symptom of that contagious, middle-cla.s.s virus that causes addiction, anxiety, depression, and ennui: affluenza. The richer we get, the poorer we feel. To fill the void, we do do. I know the feeling. Like the Pauls, I'm American, not indigenous Guatemalan. I am conditioned to equate my self-worth with being active, productive, useful.

"Oh my Lord," Paul Sr. said, a frown settling into his face. "I've got a hundred things on my list."

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone," I said, quoting Th.o.r.eau. At this, Paul Sr.'s face softened. Father and son both had a glint in their eyes as they reflected on this, their postures loose. Silence. The winds topping off the far trees. I got this acrid, almost gamey taste in my mouth just looking out into so much raw wilderness, and I said, "You could look at these thirty-two acres and think: 'What can I do with it today?' Or you could say, 'What can I leave alone today?'"

Paul Jr. had a growing smile on his face; Paul Sr. looked at me stoically.

"We could get up in the morning," Paul Jr. finally said, "and say: 'Let's not clear a forest for pasture today! Let's not extend that road. Oh, and I know what else we cannot do today: not build a bridge over the river.'"

He looked at his dad for approval but was met with a frown. Paul Jr. was undeterred: " 'Let's not plant any more beds!' The less we do, the more time to be. To hunt mushrooms, watch beavers, hike ..."

"... stargaze, compose poetry," I said. "All of which changes nothing and keeps the landscape nouris.h.i.+ng you."

"But we want want to do things," the elder Paul protested. "We get lost in our ch.o.r.es - could be working twelve hours and it flies by." to do things," the elder Paul protested. "We get lost in our ch.o.r.es - could be working twelve hours and it flies by."

"But are we bringing our workaholism with us to the wilderness?" Paul Jr. asked of no one in particular. His dad shot him a searing look, and I sensed the tension between doing and nondoing, farming and philosophy. Whereas Jackie quite consciously farmed only perhaps 5 percent of her land - and that fed her just fine - leaving the rest of it a wild s.p.a.ce for contemplation and animal habitat, these men were on the brink of developing a far larger swath of their land. There was work to be done, of course, but how much?

After a pause, Paul Jr. continued, "We don't need to go nuts out here. With our savings and my job ..."

"Your job?" his dad said, "Your job is driving a truck."

"For an organic farmers' a.s.sociation."

"Ah, the benefits of a liberal arts education," Paul Sr. said, standing up into his full stooped posture. "And now," he said, turning to face the frost-bitten garden, "we have to get to work work."

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SIMPLIFY.

14. THE IDLE MAJORITY.

ON JANUARY 21, 1949, some two billion people woke up and got out of bed, still unaware of the terrible change that had taken place in their lives. Sip some tea, chat with a spouse or a neighbor, the sun tracing an arc into the sky; take winding paths to a farm field for a few hours of work. Lunch. Siesta. Maybe a little nooky. The day seemed the same as the one before for half the planet's people, but it wasn't. Whereas before they had been, well, regular people living regular lives, now they were something else, something ghastly: some two billion people woke up and got out of bed, still unaware of the terrible change that had taken place in their lives. Sip some tea, chat with a spouse or a neighbor, the sun tracing an arc into the sky; take winding paths to a farm field for a few hours of work. Lunch. Siesta. Maybe a little nooky. The day seemed the same as the one before for half the planet's people, but it wasn't. Whereas before they had been, well, regular people living regular lives, now they were something else, something ghastly: underdeveloped underdeveloped.

The day before, President Harry S. Truman, in his inauguration speech, declared that the era of "development" had begun, thereby minting a new terminology to conceive of the world: We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped underdeveloped areas. The old imperialism - exploitation for foreign profit - has no place in our plans. What we envision is a program of areas. The old imperialism - exploitation for foreign profit - has no place in our plans. What we envision is a program of development development.

Suddenly two billion people who had been doing all right - like my ambling Mayan friends in Guatemala - were no longer doing all right. They were underdeveloped. And in one of the most spectacular missionary efforts in history, the rich nations henceforth strove to lead the underdeveloped of the world to a paradise of development, where they too would be domesticated and tethered to a logic of Total Work.

Truman might have more accurately called these "underdeveloped" people the planet's Idle Majority, the billions who reject the Puritan work ethic and extol leisure. This "leisure ethic," as I've come to dub it, isn't laziness; it is an intelligent, holistic balance between doing and being. It is embodied by the Aymaran philosophy of "living well," which includes enough (and not more) food, shelter, fresh air, and friends.h.i.+p.

In international aid work, the philosophical chasm between living well and living better can lead to culture clash - as well as to serious marital problems. I know a French aid worker who married a woman from Burkina Faso. Their most difficult problem isn't money or in-laws but idleness. His wife, he confided to me one day, "has to have five or six hours a day of doing absolutely nothing absolutely nothing in order to be happy." My friend is inclined to fill every available moment with work, hobbies, and travel, but his wife prefers to simply sit on the stoop watching the breeze in the trees, idly chatting and joking. If she doesn't get this idle time, she becomes grouchy. in order to be happy." My friend is inclined to fill every available moment with work, hobbies, and travel, but his wife prefers to simply sit on the stoop watching the breeze in the trees, idly chatting and joking. If she doesn't get this idle time, she becomes grouchy.

On another occasion in the Gambia, a West African country, I found myself explaining to a local guy in a town called Gunjur, down the coast from Banjul, how workers in the United States and Europe waged decades of union battles to win an eight-hour workday.

He looked at me with complete amazement, as if I had just said that Papa Smurf lived on the moon and was waving down at us. "They fought," he finally said, grasping to comprehend, "to work eight hours eight hours a day?" a day?"

"Exactly!" I exclaimed, a little proud to have shared a bit of Western labor history that might help him in his struggles.

To my shock, the man burst out laughing. Amid guffaws he managed to get across that he and others in Gunjur worked three or four hours a day. It was absurd, he said, to fight all those decades to work more, especially in a rich country! It became a running joke with us. "Hey, Bill," he'd say whenever he saw me, "I think I'll work eight eight hours today," then collapse into a belly laugh. hours today," then collapse into a belly laugh.

At a certain point in my "development" career, I began to question the whole notion of who's impoverished. As the years pa.s.sed abroad, I sensed that Truman had the thing turned on its head. Amazingly, most of the so-called impoverished beneficiaries of my programs were better off than me. That is to say, their cultures had come up with a way of living in the world that contributed more to happiness - in Dr. Seligman's sense of "general well-being" - than my culture. Throughout the Global South, people, by and large, had achieved higher levels of Seligman's three factors: they had bigger smiles; they were very often engaged in the moment; and through their kins.h.i.+p networks and close relations.h.i.+p with Mother Earth, they achieved a greater sense of meaning and purpose.

Thinking perhaps that my lived experience was too subjective, I decided to check the social science data. Holland's Erasmus University ranked Colombia - of all places - as the happiest nation on earth. Great Britain's Journal of Happiness Studies Journal of Happiness Studies put Colombia at number four in the world. And the Happy Planet Index of the New Economy Foundation ranked Colombia second. These studies essentially ranked general well-being, or how people feel about their own lives. put Colombia at number four in the world. And the Happy Planet Index of the New Economy Foundation ranked Colombia second. These studies essentially ranked general well-being, or how people feel about their own lives.

The fact that folks in Colombia, a so-called underdeveloped country - which ranks below forty other countries in terms of GDP - is so darn happy is curious only when one equates higher material living standards with higher levels of well-being. In the Biswas-Diener survey, 96 percent of Colombians defined themselves as content with life. Most rich nations rank miles below Colombia and tend to have the planet's highest rates of divorce, child abuse, addiction, and suicide. Indeed, a recent Emory University study showed that just 17 percent of Americans were "flouris.h.i.+ng" in mental health terms, while 26 percent were "languis.h.i.+ng" in depression.

Eventually, it dawned on me that while, according to my job descriptions over the past decade, I had been working in underdeveloped nations, perhaps I'd actually been working most of the time in developed developed nations - and that I came from an unhealthily nations - and that I came from an unhealthily overdeveloped overdeveloped nation. Like a bodybuilder so loaded with steroids that he becomes impotent, America's hyper-consumerism came with unwanted environmental and psychological side effects. nation. Like a bodybuilder so loaded with steroids that he becomes impotent, America's hyper-consumerism came with unwanted environmental and psychological side effects.

I do not mean this to glorify material dest.i.tution. I make an important distinction: even in this revised conception, not every Global South country would qualify as "developed." I've accompanied some of the millions of people who cannot afford to live even 12 12. They live a a, with no lush organic gardens, no gently flowing creek, and no shelter at all overhead. They live in what you might call the Fourth World, those anarchic, failed s.p.a.ces where community - the glue of enough - has been decimated by war, famine, and natural disaster, as well as by the great unnatural disaster, corporate economic globalization.

When discussing relatively "poorer" countries, we need to make a clear, explicit distinction between people living in a state of material dest.i.tution and people living healthy subsistence lifestyles. Terms like poverty poverty and and Third World Third World mask this distinction and give license for modern professionals - of whom I've long been one - to undervalue, denigrate, and interfere with sustainable ways of life. mask this distinction and give license for modern professionals - of whom I've long been one - to undervalue, denigrate, and interfere with sustainable ways of life.

There's a point where one's material life is in balance: one has neither too much nor too little. Per my own a.n.a.lysis of GDP and global happiness studies, roughly one-fifth of humanity has too much and is overdeveloped; another fifth has too little and is underdeveloped. Neither of these groups experiences general well-being. The former, with materialism caked on like a million barnacles, can rarely experience the simple joy of being. The latter are so dest.i.tute that they can't sustain their bodies physically. Fortunately, the third group - those with enough - is by far the largest. It is what I call "developed," ranging from subsistence livelihoods like that of the Maya of Guatemala to the level of the average European circa 1990.

By this rough calculation, 60 percent of the world lives sustainably, in a global sense. In other words, if everyone lived as they did, one planet - the one we're on right now - would suffice to feed, clothe, shelter, and absorb the waste of everyone. (In contrast, if everyone lived at the level of the average American, we'd require the resources of four additional earth-sized planets.) One solution practically jumps out: The 20 percent with too much should share with the 20 percent with too little. Of course, there will always be inequalities, but isn't it in our best interests to lessen the grotesque differences of today's world? Social science research, spiritual traditions, and most of our personal experience tell us that neither too much nor too little leads to well-being.

Idleness has been under threat at least since we stamped "underdeveloped" on the majority of humankind, most of whom actually live in enough. In the past two or three generations, a significant portion of the Global South has flocked to cities from tiny rural villages, where they lived and worked in concert with nature and traditional values for centuries. Why is this? In part, it is the allure of modern life, of technology and industrialized affluence, leading to what you might call a voluntary flattening. This is exemplified by those highland Bolivian women (cholitas) who leave behind their mothers, still wrestling Pachamama for potatoes, and light out for the city to find jobs sewing underwear or selling cheap Chinese electronics - and then spend their hard-earned disposable income on neon-colored Chinese silk, wool Italian hats, and dangly earrings, becoming proud, flashy members of the Flat World. There's an undeniable seduction to individualism and consumption, especially when that seduction is sweetened by trillions of global marketing dollars.

However, there are trade-offs and often disillusionment: many cholitas cholitas end up living in the polluted, sprawling El Alto slums; Mexicans find themselves in cookie-cutter suburbs crowding the hills outside the Tijuana end up living in the polluted, sprawling El Alto slums; Mexicans find themselves in cookie-cutter suburbs crowding the hills outside the Tijuana maquilas maquilas. Nor is this change wholly and truly "voluntary": cholitas cholitas sometimes cannot stay on the family farm because the potatoes are gone or nearly worthless. Crop failures fueled by climate change; price crashes caused by global agribusiness; and the sense, even in those small villages, that tending your local corn crop is a devalued, almost useless skill in the global economy. sometimes cannot stay on the family farm because the potatoes are gone or nearly worthless. Crop failures fueled by climate change; price crashes caused by global agribusiness; and the sense, even in those small villages, that tending your local corn crop is a devalued, almost useless skill in the global economy.

Tough choices face both the Workaholic North and the Idle Majority. We're in the same s.h.i.+p, trying to navigate choppy twenty-first-century waters. Those in the Idle Majority who navigate it best seem to be the ones who don't exchange their entire culture for seductive consumption. In Bolivia, El Alto is an interesting example because many families living there go back and forth between that sprawling urban area and their traditional villages. They still maintain a connection with the land, including continuing to plant and harvest potatoes. They retain the best of what their grandparents knew, stewarding "vernacular culture" - a body of knowledge that has evolved over thousands of years in every corner of the globe. Vernacular culture is the enduring wisdom that sustains a spiritually rich life, so it is regenerative by nature of survival. Most such wisdom has a keen awareness of how to nurture dignified life in a certain locale with particular soils, climate, water, biodiversity, and cultural traditions. Nearly all vernacular cultures embrace abundant idleness, the "beingness" that binds humans and nature.

Could part of the solution to our ecological crisis be found in rediscovering ways to maintain a place for idleness? Instead of merely handing out "development aid," the North might also seek and receive "vernacular aid" from the Global South, gathering clues toward living more softly now.

AT THE 12 X 12, I NOTICED, part of wildcrafting involves reclaiming the right to be idle - a ratcheting down from overdeveloped to developed, from too much to enough. Jackie expressed it to me once like this: part of the joy of simplifying one's material life is that you don't have to work long hours to buy and maintain a bunch of stuff. This leaves time for open-ended chats - like the kind I began to have with Paul Jr. part of wildcrafting involves reclaiming the right to be idle - a ratcheting down from overdeveloped to developed, from too much to enough. Jackie expressed it to me once like this: part of the joy of simplifying one's material life is that you don't have to work long hours to buy and maintain a bunch of stuff. This leaves time for open-ended chats - like the kind I began to have with Paul Jr.

I found myself hanging out with him quite a bit. One day, shortly after we met on his farm, we engaged in a playful dharma chat at an outdoor table at Adams Marketplace, a food co-op and lunch joint twelve miles along the highway from Jackie's. He looked at me through his just-on-the-right-side-of-hip eyegla.s.ses and asked, "Do you know Carlos Castaneda?"

I nodded. "

Okay. There's this moment in The Teachings of Don Juan The Teachings of Don Juan where Castaneda is with the shaman, Don Juan, in this tiny house in the southwest desert. Don Juan asks Castaneda to look at one of the walls." where Castaneda is with the shaman, Don Juan, in this tiny house in the southwest desert. Don Juan asks Castaneda to look at one of the walls."

Paul Jr. paused melodramatically and looked at one of the co-op walls. "Castaneda studied the wall, taking comfort in the everyday objects in front of it: books, a lamp, vases, kitchenware ..."

I pictured the wall of Jackie's kitchen, the spices and preserves, pots and kettle.

"And then," Paul continued, "Don Juan asked him to turn around and look at the opposite wall."

In my mind, I turned around in Jackie's, facing the wall with the windows looking out at the night sky, Venus in the window. Paul leaned closer to me and spoke more softly, "On the other side of the cabin, there was no wall, no comforting objects. Castaneda looked out into nothing but deep, cold s.p.a.ce deep, cold s.p.a.ce."

He looked at me, bright-eyed, appearing much younger than his thirty-seven years. "Do you get it? There's nothing. That's the point. We live in a cold, meaningless universe."

"What do you think?" I asked Paul.

"This is maybe the biggest question in my life. And I'm leaning ..." - Paul shook his head, grinning - "I'm leaning toward the cold void. Why do many people need a cuddly universe, loving them? What do you think?"

Paul looked at me. I looked into the blue sky behind him, with its wisps of cloud, as if for an answer. There's no answer, I thought. Like nature, G.o.d is now you see her, now you don't. Is Castaneda right, elsewhere, when he insists that "all paths are the same, they lead nowhere," and that the only important thing is to choose a path with heart? Castaneda found himself staring into Nietzsche's existential void. I was about to respond, when Paul said: "Oh look, that's Jenny Jespersen coming our way."

"I'm on the tail end of my lunch break, so can't dally," Jenny Jespersen told Paul in a staccato voice. "And do you work here, Paul? Because I always see you sitting here."

"I'm an ociologo ociologo," said Paul with a grin. Jenny shook her head. "A leisureologist," he translated.

Jenny was all business: she gave us a rundown of her agenda as the senior finance committee chair for Adams County, and then, just as quickly as she had arrived, she was gone. All around us, even in the supposedly laid-back Adams Marketplace, everyone was in a hurry, all the hip nonprofit people and biodiesel brewers and organic farmers on the prowl for markets, for cash, for status, but Paul hadn't stopped grinning. This was what I liked about him; he simply loved the present moment. He never hurried, or hustled after money or prestige; he just remained blissful in each moment. One time, I accompanied Paul in his old pickup truck to the organic farmers' cooperative. His job was delivering produce around the state - but he worked only one or two days a week, by his own choice. That day we stopped to collect his paycheck for the past two weeks. Ten dollars an hour times a couple of days didn't add up to much. But Paul smiled, looking at the tiny amount on the check, shaking his head in wonder at this bounty. He turned to me and said, "Bill, we're going to celebrate!"

I felt a rush of pleasure. The so-called enlightened master - the bodhisattva, the sage - has so much in common with the archetypal "fool," those blessed with Forrest Gump innocence and optimism. There was Paul Jr., a tiny paycheck, an enormous smile. He had a master's degree; he had every opportunity to find work that paid better than truck driving, but he valued time more than money. Slowing down, for him and others like him in Adams County, was a radical act in the context of an overscheduled America.

AS TIME Pa.s.sED, life in the 12 12 became a course in Leisureology 101. Embraced by a local subculture intent on joining the world's Idle Majority, I felt less guilty about the open days stretching out before me, with nothing on the agenda. Whenever the workaholism bug began to bite, I recalled Jackie's advice: For now, be, don't do. It occurred to me that the times when I slowed down - in the 12 12 and at other points in my life - were ironically the times when I got the most work done. Creativity flows smoothly out of nonaction, from deep wells of idleness. The creative self savors aimless wanderings where you slip into your own snug skin. It's what writer Brenda Ueland calls "moodling," or productively dawdling away the hours. When you moodle, your subconscious works out aesthetics and structure without the overactive rational mind's interference. life in the 12 12 became a course in Leisureology 101. Embraced by a local subculture intent on joining the world's Idle Majority, I felt less guilty about the open days stretching out before me, with nothing on the agenda. Whenever the workaholism bug began to bite, I recalled Jackie's advice: For now, be, don't do. It occurred to me that the times when I slowed down - in the 12 12 and at other points in my life - were ironically the times when I got the most work done. Creativity flows smoothly out of nonaction, from deep wells of idleness. The creative self savors aimless wanderings where you slip into your own snug skin. It's what writer Brenda Ueland calls "moodling," or productively dawdling away the hours. When you moodle, your subconscious works out aesthetics and structure without the overactive rational mind's interference.

One day I flipped to a new card in Jackie's pile: DON'T BE SO PREDICTABLE. I smiled, picturing Jackie writing it and thinking about how "serious" science and spirituality, for her, intermingled with self-effacing humor. Her card said to me: Live uniquely in this unique moment. I must have subconsciously taken it to heart later that morning when I left the breakfast dishes unwashed and walked quite abruptly down the road - in my pajamas.