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The abundance of sufficiency
During the arctic periods of weather last winter and this, I’ve felt my life-style has come into its own. It’s about forty-five years since my late husband and I decided to live after a pattern cultivated by Benedictine monastics: to divide the twenty-four hour day into eight hours of sleeping, eight hours for the busy-ness of living and eight hours for the Contemplative Life – only we swapped Contemplative for Creative, so that Jerry could paint and I could write.
Simple luxury
The busy-ness of living varies. For us, it involved gardening, animal husbandry, (goats and poultry), carrying fuel into the house and ashes out, water in and slops out. Yes. We made the conscious decision not to have plumbing in our home. What a boon, when other houses suffer from burst pipes! Another decision was against central heating. We’d installed it in our first house – a tall, Victorian slice of a terrace town house. We didn’t like it. Our next home, a remote old farmhouse, steeply set on the flank of a narrow Welsh valley, had a kitchen sixteen feet, by twenty-six feet, with a range we’d put in at one end and an inglenook hearth at the other. The fire was lit in a corner on the stone-flagged floor. Its blaze was pure luxury on a winter’s night – the more so when the ancient hip-bath was hauled out before it, shielded by a folding screen from the rest of the big room and one’s bum sank into the hot water, while face and chest were reddened by the flames!
Such a kitchen embraced a family. Different conversations and different activities cohabited around the opposing sources of heat, lit by candles, or temperamental Aladdin oil lamps. We shirked the duties of care offered by the Lister diesel generator we’d bought and never installed electricity.
Working to keep fit
The children had begun to leave home before we sought another remote, hillside home. This time it was a smaller house, in Donegal, overlooking a broad glacial valley between the Blue Stacks and the Atlantic.
There was no suitable well for a gravity-fed water supply, but the roof – corrugated steel we’d used to replace the colander of thatch – plumbed to heavy-duty plastic barrels, provided a reliable source of washing water, while the quarter-mile walk downhill to the well gave us sweet water for drinking and cooking.
Do you do weights to keep fit? So do I, but there’s a by-product to my weight-lifting: buckets of water, safely placed on the kitchen floor; turf, or timber stacked for the range, or the evening fire; compost toilet and piddle bucket lugged to the compost bins – all of this labour creates luxury. The smaller house accommodates us older folk better. It swells and stretches into the outdoors when the younger generations visit. They love the novelty of going to the well in its secluded grotto in the woods.
Is this the idyllic life? Of course it is. For some reason, people who live in homes buzzing and throbbing with ‘modern amenities’ seem to believe that ‘idyllic’ means inertia and constant comfort – or, like Picasso, who said, “To live simply, one must be very rich” - because he couldn’t entertain the idea of doing the work himself that simplicity requires.
No unnecessary extravagance
To some of my visitors, my simple life implies austerity and they are surprised to find my house is warm, (even when the outdoor temperature is -15!), and I use hot water to wash myself. But it needs working at.
There’s no surplus, unnecessary extras when it’s one’s own labour that provides for one’s luxury. It’s pointless to have excesses. They either decay, like neglected fruit in the garden, or silt up with dust, as with unnecessary knick-knacks. Sufficiency equals abundance. And my life is full of abundance – the full-flavoured freshness of garden produce, the sheen of rain-washed hair and skin, the aroma of turf, or timber smoke, the purr of well-fed cats – the eight hours of creativity every day…
During the three months before Christmas, I made every single present, mostly knitting my own hand-spun yarn to warm each member of the tribe that is my family. This was another source of luxury. I could give gifts that came from my time and my hands and my love. Money can get in the way of these revelations.
IMF economics will give the opportunities of less money and more time to many people, who can then discover for themselves the Abundance of Sufficiency.
A Soil Association report in the UK finds that Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) offers many benefits to members,
communities, local economies and...
