"If you have
no time for your family you want to ask yourself, 'Why must I
always be doing something?' God made us human beings, not human
doings!"
--Heard
over a car radio between Omaha
and
North Platte, Nebraska
"Do nothing.
Time is too precious to waste," said Buddha; if that sounds like
nonsense, stop reading now, but if you feel you've been
conditioned like a laboratory rat by the pervasive propaganda of
20th century institutions like schools and banks and hospitals,
read on. One quick way to tell if mechanism has invaded your
living tissue is to consider how important lists are to your life.
Home improvement lists, self-improvement lists, lists of meetings,
appointments, responsibilities, things to remember? Does list
management fill much of your time?
And does
your social life consist of watching actors pretend to be real
people or telling your friends what you bought, what you nearly
bought and what you are going to buy? If somewhere along the way
your life has come to seem pointless, then read on as I tell you
how Janet and I came to do nothing with our farm on purpose. It
might help you to understand what Buddha had on his
mind.
Twenty-seven
years ago, after six years of living in Manhattan - I from
Pittsburgh and Janet from Oyster Bay - we bought 134 acres of land
in rural New York State located midway between Ithaca where I'd
gone to school and Cooperstown where the Baseball Hall of Fame is.
The land was in Chenango County, in the southeastern corner of the
Burned-Over District, an area of great spiritual ferment in the
19th century which had produced the Mormons, the Perfectionists,
the Millerites, the incident that launched the Anti-Masonic Party,
and a host of other individualistic, quirky movements that attest
to how rich life can be in an asystematic society. I bought the
land with a fellow schoolteacher sight unseen, in a manner I'll
explain in a moment. Chenango County was, is and always will be, I
think, lightly populated, a corn and cow/sheep land not fit for
the attention of sophisticated tourists and real-estate
speculators.
The
population of the nearest town to my farm is the same now as it
was in 1905 and the whole county has about 50 inhabitants a square
mile, about 1/6th less than it had in 1835 in the glory days of
the Chenango Canal. Even in 1993 plenty of beautiful land is
available there for $500 an acre or less, 90 minutes from
Syracuse, two hours from Albany, four hours from New York City. I
paid much less than that in 1968 when I acquired the property,
about $48 an acre with a 7 year mortgage at 6%. That's probably
the chief reason I bought the land unseen when I saw the ad in the
real-estate listings of the Sunday New York Times.
That
particular Sunday I had been sitting with friends ranting and
raving about how many great bargains are always available if you
know what value is. I offered to prove the point on the real
estate pages. "Just buy what no one else wants as long as you're
sure that the reason for not wanting it - dirt roads, no running
water, things like that - are dumb." Then read
Tumbling
Waterfall Retreat
134 acres, 7
year mortgage, 6%. Old barn,
pond sites,
5 miles from Oxford, New York.
The next day
I picked up the phone, dialed the agent, and told him I'd wire the
down payment that day. If you know your own mind (which isn't a
priority of schooling) you don't often need expert advice to make
decisions because you are the only real expert on what you need
and what you can live with. How did I know the land was any good?
That's easy; any good for what? What should it be good for, to
make money?, I thought it ought to offer a private place away from
machinery where you could do just about anything you wanted
without interference and nosy neighbors. With a little
long-distance research I knew it was good for that so I bought it
without worrying. At $500 down and around $100 a month payments
almost anyone could have bought that land if they weren't
afraid.
What was to
be afraid of? The taxes were about $300 a year and a nearby farmer
paid $100 to cut off the hay. He paid us to cut our "grass". Wild
land exists to put us smack in the middle of animal nature,
creatures who regulate their lives in a different way than we do
ours; it exists to teach seasons, fertility and that there is no
death, just endless translations from one form to another. Wild
land gives you back the sky and the harmonies of the planet, but
it charges an invisible price for what it has to give - you must
leave it wild or it loses its power and becomes a green
office.
By the time
my wild land came along I was thirty-two and was just beginning to
reach the stage in my own life where I could see that doing things
the right way, rationalizing your time on the best principles of
human engineering and living your life from the prison chamber of
your mind instead of your heart was a catastrophic mistake. The
"life" part of life just won't engineer all the way unless you're
willing to become a mechanism. All the rewards of the good life
that can be counted like money and titles and honors and compleat
property requiring expert advice to manage - the material things -
were at bottom disturbingly unrewarding. I hadn't always thought
that way for I had gone to two Ivy League colleges specifically to
accumulate material and display it as evidence of my worth. And I
did that for a while but it left me feeling worthless. A great
puzzle for many of us.
After I
bought that land I forgot the lesson I'm trying to teach you - or
rather that Buddha is trying to teach you and me. For years I
raced about digging ponds, chopping trees, clearing paths, pulling
rocks, unclogging channels, planting - always I was making lists,
plans, agendas. I was always " improving" things. I loved to drive
into the little towns of the county to shop and see movies and sit
around pretending to be a country gentlemen, but regularly Janet
would ask why we couldn't just stay on the land, why did we always
have to be going and doing? At first that baffled me, but later as
I reflected on it I understood that Janet was keeping score a
different way and that intrigued me. Stay on the land and do what?
Work, of course, to "improve" it, but then what?
One day
after finishing some important project I made a list of all the
things I had yet to do according to the Master Plan of my land
ambition. There were fifty major projects remaining, and at two a
year, which was all I could manage racing back and forth from New
York City on weekends and summers, I would be sixty-five when they
were done. According to my schedule I could begin enjoying my land
thirty years down the line.
Something
was dreadfully wrong. What was wrong was that I was a fool. Like
so many of us I was a part in an abstract idea-machine called
"progress"; like an accountant I measured success by the bottom
line of things gotten out of the way, finished, terminated. That's
how a computer might be set to keep track of work, but the
pleasure of being real lies in the process, not the mere product,
primarily in "being" and only peripherally in "doing." In the
world we've fashioned built on our envy of machines we've arranged
things to reverse the natural order of importance; somewhere deep
down everyone understands this, but in avoiding the truth we
assign ourselves a miserable destiny trying to be machines. Those
who succeed best at this lead horrible lives regardless of
appearances. Watching and being part of the natural world and
understanding it is the great domestic challenge - without success
at this we never have a home - what Nature can give stops giving
when it is over-regulated, or exploited with ag school technology
and bulldozers.
We all need
the wildness of the non-human planet to restore our spirits, not
parks and beaches where the human element is still the central
focus and regulation runs rampant. Instead we collect evidence of
our domination by mapping it, scheduling it and controlling it.
And all that gives us is a green imitation of city life and some
square tomatoes.
So now I do
nothing with my farm. I go there to let it teach me things.
sometimes I putter but not often because time is too precious to
waste. The living quarters are in an old barn with "1906" drawn in
the concrete on the milking floor. My original intention was to
build a broad covered porch around the whole structure and arrange
the inside like a private cathedral with a fifty-foot ceiling.
Still not a bad idea but now, twenty-seven years later it remains
a barn and that turned out to be a better idea. There's about 1200
square feet of open space on the hay floor and way up in the air
against the roof is a 20 X 20 insulated room reached by climbing
three banks of wooden steps. Kenny, who was the boyfriend of one
of my college students, built the room, roofed and refloored the
barn, in exchange for 5 acres of land. Good deal all
around.
But much of
the time we don't use the insulated room, instead sleeping in two
lovely old beds under the lofty roof with mice racing about the
rafters in plain view (not too many), bats squeaking in the eaves,
barn swallows twittering and the most amazing light pouring in
through inch-wide spaces between the vertical wall
boards.
It's very
much like living in a bird house. We draw water from a gorge a
half-mile away which probably should have been tested but never
was; drinking hundreds of gallons, at first tentatively, then with
delight, was the test. No water ever tasted like our gorge water
run over rocks; I've come. to see that participating with the
water you drink is a wonderful way to feel good; it took some time
to get used to the walk back and forth and to clear away the
machined notion that time was somehow being
wasted.
Bathing is
out of a bucket or in pools and ponds, and the toilet is wherever
you are with the details varying according to the person and a
proper respect for such things, On Manhattan's famous Upper
Westside we have three bathrooms but they give us no better
results. In over a quarter-century I can honestly say we never
missed running water or plumbing, and the transition from both was
effected almost at once. That was surprising, how close to the
surface our human good sense is, in spite of all the conditioning
and mechanical overlay.
Our barn
holds about 3000 books which must fend for them-selves in all
seasons housed in many makeshift facilities. All were bought at
country auctions for a dollar or two a box, lots of 19th century
evangelical stuff, hand-colored children's books, Crime Club
thrillers, whatever - when you read in a barn it's like
discovering reading all over again. It's the greatest fun, far
beyond television, movies and Broadway shows; having had both over
a reasonably long lifetime I feel I can say that
honestly.
The main
activity on our farm is keeping animals, as it is on many farms,
but the difference is we don't own any of them, and they feed
themselves. Deer are so plentiful they are a daily experience,
snorting, playing like young dogs, hanging out; wild turkey are
common, too, and at night they flock by the squadron in the gorge
behind the barn; snakes abound but no-one has ever been bitten,
skunks, turtles, raccoons, coyote, fox, mink, one bear and a large
colony of blue herons that land on the pond and fish like
pterodactyls off our half-sunken dock, The bear moved in on the
stream at the foot of the hill last year. Live and let live works
better than regulation; it's nice to have a bear around.
The most
unbelievable creatures of all are the night moths. Janet
discovered these one night just outside the barn flying in the
half light; their shapes and colors are so divorced from any
normal insect life I'm familiar with I felt transported into a
prehistory when the world was new just watching
them.
When I used
to schoolteach, my kids and I would discuss style a lot, getting a
style of your own and how that must be done . I gradually came to
feel it was very difficult unless you were alone a lot, had time
and space to yourself, were free of the need to attend other
people's urgencies all the time - or the urgencies of a commercial
world. How can you expect to be unique if every minute you draw
models from other people and the shadows of other people drawn
from television? How can the unique destiny that is in every one
of us exercise itself if you always submit to the scrutiny and
judgment of authorities? Authorities on what? Certainly not on you
unless you have been diminished into something predictable, tamed
by regulation, simplification and rationalization. A steady diet
of that will waste all your time.
Compelling
evidence exists that we are meant to be unique individuals who
live in harmony with other unique individuals: think of the
harmony of snow falling, but the brilliant oneness of each
snowflake; think of the harmony of beach sand, but the brilliant
oneness of each sand grain; think of the harmony of a field of
grass, but the brilliant oneness of each blade in shape, and even
hue. Are we that way, too? Consider your own fingerprint, unlike
any on earth, your unique signature - can you think of a reason
for evolution to produce such a signal unless the organism is one
of a kind? And if you think of God instead of evolution it will be
even easier to deduce a purpose in all of this. If people are
inherently sortable into a few categories - as industrial
civilization makes them out to be - then the fingerprint is a
crazy detail. It only makes sense as a guide to the individual
experiment that each of us is.
As Buddha
said, time is too precious to waste doing much of anything;. I'm
still learning what that means, but I never might have known about
this at all if I hadn't bought a big piece of wild, unregulated
scrub land and left it that way. I hope my children's children
leave it that way, too, if circumstances allow them to inherit it.
I learned just to be from watching sunlight in the pond, birds
taking dust baths on the dirt road, frogs watching me as I watched
them. Janet once said, "Hey, look at us, we're watching the birds,
not just 'bird watching'". It's an important
difference.
Of course we
do things, too: we eat a lot of wild foods that we used to call
weeds, we dig up blueberry bushes for gifts, build bonfires at
night, transplant wild flowers, stuff like that. I finally figured
out why real farms are often messy looking around the buildings,
when you kick over something unimportant it doesn't need to be
picked up right away, and nothing should ever be thrown away that
might be useful tomorrow.
In the time
we won back decontrolling our reflexes we came to learn to manage
our spirits better; it's impossible to live this way without
coming to love nearly everything, and feeling an obligation to it,
too. We have a laboratory of nature stretched out daily for our
understanding, not our exploitation. The greatest use of wild
places isn't in "using" them but just in being
there.
The original
meaning of the word "school" (schola) was a place that afforded
solitude, silence and freedom from duties so the student would
have maximum opportunity to open himself to the universe and
learn. It's difficult to find such a school. Our institutions are
too occupied in watching us for signs of unacceptable deviation,
in regulating each minute of the year according to ex-pert
prescriptions. As the quality of life imposed by our politically
progressive regimen declines steadily into frightening sub-regions
of the soul it makes sense for prudent people to go in search of
personal solutions. It's only human to invite other people to save
themselves, too, but if no one listens there is still a world that
will, out there to be found; there is still a world inside
yourself and your loved ones to protect and enjoy.
Personal
solutions exist. Out of personal solutions great social solutions
can be put together. The one I've described just now is within
reach - wild land, the less road-accessible and "improved" the
better, is available in abundance within an easy drive of every
metropolitan area in America, much more so today than it was a
hundred years ago. Get some as soon as you can, the wilder and
scruffier the better. Then do nothing. It will be your school. And
it will become your home.