“Cuba did not go the way of possessions,” says the Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer in the lovely movie, “The Buena Vista Social Club.”

Last month I experienced the possession-less path on a visit to the Lutheran Church in Cuba. I’m not pro- or anti-Castro, but as a Lutheran with serious questions about U.S. consumer culture, I found it refreshing to step COMPLETELY outside it.

Our first few days were spent on the Isla de la Juventud, an island off the southern coast where the Cuban Lutheran Church is based. (Click here to read the island’s history.) On this rural island, time seemed to have stood still. With few private cars, people moved about on foot, on bicycles, in bicycle taxis, in trucks converted to buses, and even by horse and buggy. When the roosters stopped crowing and the hour for turning down the ever-throbbing reggaeton music arrived, it was amazingly quiet. The din of traffic we are accustomed to was absent.

Also absent were television commercials. Movies ran without interruption. Newscasts lasted 45 minutes. Of course, the movies and the music videos being shown were themselves a kind of commercial for the way of possessions, but never once was anyone exhorted to buy a product. Public health announcements and promotions for cultural events ran instead.

The home I stayed in had everything but clutter. My hostess had enough glasses, plates, and silverware for everyone present, but no more. When I shivered under a sheet during an unseasonably cold night, she produced a second sheet and a blanket.

Isla de la Juventud gave me a glimpse into life organized around something besides stuff. Now, it wasn’t Eden, and most people I met were actually trying to get MORE stuff. One man said that Cuba does $650 million in business with the U.S., but because of the embargo, the goods arrive chopped up in the  suitcases of returning relatives and residents. The Havana charter area of Miami Airport was teeming with televisions, radios, and microwaves wrapped in blue plastic to protect them on their flight. My fellow travelers from the ELCA Florida-Bahamas Synod, the companion synod to the Cuban Lutheran Church, said that on their last trip they had seen a bumper, a muffler, a car door, and a windshield wrapped for the journey.

It’s not easy to move around on the island, and we were frequently hungry. 9 hours might pass between our breakfast and our return to the church for our communal supper. That obese or even overweight people were few and far between was evidence that you can’t just drive up to a store or a restaurant for a snack.  The consumption of milk and meat are restricted for most people, and it can be hard to secure food and building materials. That was clear in Havana, which has more cars and restaurants and stores and tourists,  but is teeming with beautiful buildings that are falling apart.

My book Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal asks the question, “what is enough?” Most Americans passed “enough” decades ago. I’m convinced we are entering a time in which we will happily and willingly scale back our “enough”, for the sake of our physical, emotional, and planetary health.

In Cuba, the answer to “what is enough?” is “this is too little.” And although Cuba’s way of few possessions has been imposed, I know, from the top, in its stark mirror it’s possible to see our own excesses clearly.

90 miles from Miami, and no television commercials. ¡Imaginelo!

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

Six months ago I got rid of most of my worldly goods, sold my house, put things in storage, left my ELCA job, and commenced a simple living-style midlife sabbatical. Since then I’ve been a guest, not a resident, in more than 30 places, privy to an intimate view of how we live and consume today.

When I had a home address, simplifying and greening my life was about building a system of regular habits: recycling, public transit, car sharing, community-supported agriculture, resale shopping, expense tracking, green cleaning practices, line drying, etc. My everyday system has vanished. As a guest, I participate as gracefully and gratefully as possible (I don’t always succeed) in the systems around me. Here’s what I’ve noticed.

Too much stuff.

It’s a mess out there. Almost everyone lives in confusion and clutter. The households you could call “spare” belong to retired people (raised under in less materialistic times), former Holden Village long-term staffers (veterans of life in the wilderness) and former ELCA missionaries (like me, visitors to planet consumer, due to their cross-cultural, outside-the-US experiences).

Everyone else, especially those with kids still at home, is too overwhelmed with obligations to bring any kind of order to rooms full of toys and furniture and knick-knacks and sports equipment and coats and shoes and books and televisions and laptops and CDs and DVDs and computers and toys.

My Christmas present to my siblings with families was a day of deep cleaning, of tackling big problems they had not time for. Because I love cleaning with the stereo up loud, I had fun, and my work was significant and appreciated…but hardly made a dent.

If everyone in the US had a garage sale at the same time, would it be like a run on the bank? Would everything suddenly be valueless, so we could somehow stop the flow of stuff from Stuff Central, wherever that is?

Perhaps, like that drawing in The Little Prince of the boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant, we have a hump stuck in us, and after we digest, recycle, or landfill it, we will get over having to own everything someone tells us to buy, and we can go on to valuing ideas, services, art, music, skills—“things” that are non-material and ask only for space in our hearts and minds.

But hospitality still rules.

Last summer a former ELCA missionary told me that her family noticed, after they came back from 6 years in Tanzania, that nobody invited them home for dinner anymore. All they got were invitations to go out for coffee. After the intense hospitality of Arusha, they were very lonely indeed.

Are we afraid to invite people into our messes, or too worried about time to turn an hour of coffee into a full evening? Somehow my status as relative or very old friend has gotten me around the “let’s meet for coffee” barrier, because I’ve discovered that no matter what the mess, people do still cook, bake, and linger around the table in private. Is there something we can do to open up our homes, and put dinner invitations back at the top of our social lives?

Too many cars.

In the face of nearly universal car ownership, I keep slogging away at getting from point A to point B without one. Portland, Oregon, makes it easy. And if you’ve got three hours, it’s possible to cover the 75 miles between the Seattle airport and my family’s farm in Mt. Vernon on public transportation. In Sacramento, I bike a lot.

When I need a car, I try to be creative. Without a fixed address, I can’t participate in a formal car sharing program, so I share informally by using or renting my siblings’ cars when they are not using them. (I like to think of this as using excess capacity.) I got to Berkeley today by emailing friends and siblings to see if they or anyone they knew had to be in the Bay Area for meetings or work this week. A college friend dropped me here on his way to San Francisco this morning, and my sister will drive me back to Sacramento after a board meeting here tomorrow. I could have taken Amtrak, but using social media—the online equivalent of the ride boards we used to depend on in the 70s—to make a car pool saved me $48 and is giving me three hours of conversation with two dear people.

But where are the others who are thinking this way? Car pooling, public transportation, bicycling and walking—even one or two days a week!—get little more than lip service from drivers. Drivers just keep…driving.

Deciding to live simply and sustainably is harder in a family.

Brushing my teeth in other homes has shown me that simplifying my own life was a piece of cake. As a single parent, I could make and enforce the big lifestyle decisions. And I wouldn’t be on this west coast sofa tour if I weren’t already an empty nester. People in couples and people with children at home don’t get to act unilaterally. More compromise is involved. This has been humbling.

Living simply on the road can make you feel needy.

Could I borrow your car this morning if I take you to work buy you some gas? Can we drive to Berkeley together? Since you’re dropping your daughter off at her job at the mall, could I run into that REI store, so I don’t have to figure out how to get there on the bus? Is there a library with wireless somewhere near by? Could I do a load of wash this morning? Sure, if you really don’t need that GoreTex raincoat, I’ll be glad to use it.

Living simply on the road can make you feel resourceful.

Of course I can show you how to get from your place to the airport on public transit. Have a slice of the pie I just baked you. The Greyhound gets in at 3:00 pm so we can meet at 4:00. Here, let me pick up the lunch tab/buy the concert tickets/get those groceries. Check out the kitchen cabinets I washed and organized for you!

If you’re a web designer, could you please build my dream web site?

In the last two weeks I flew from Sacramento to Seattle to Portland to Sacramento, all on Alaska Air. I need a web site that lets me mix and match modes of transportation, so I could book a flight to Seattle, a train or bus to Portland (because for trips under 500 miles, it’s “greener” to use ground transportation), and then the Portland to Seattle flight. If I can’t book it all at once, could the site please recommend ALL the options for traveling between cities before I default to the most common and most highly advertised alternative? If you build it, I will come, and tell everybody else about it. The only thing close is hopstop.com, which offers bus & subway directions for 12 cities plus all of metropolitan New York/New Jersey. This has already been named a “top startup” by some Internet rating agency. I’ll bet my idea would find many fans.

Next stop, Latin America

A sabbatical is freeing but not free. Travel expenses have replaced mortgage, utilities, and grocery bills. Next week, my visits to planet consumer take a dramatic turn as I go off to Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala and Suriname for the next three months. I’ll get to visit Lutherans all along the way (more sofas!), and will post whenever possible. Thank you for traveling with me this far.

Anne Basye

Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal

Here’s a bunch of interesting things I’ve come across lately, about simplicity and sustainability, some of it here in California.

Individual carbon credits? Among the “10 ideas that might make the next 10 years more interesting, healthy or civil” proposed by U2 star Bono in the January 3 New York Times is the concept that individuals, not industries or countries, be allowed to trade carbon credits. “The average Ethiopian can sell her underpolluting ways (people in Ethiopia emit about 0.1 ton of carbon a year) to the average American (about 20 tons a year) and use the proceeds to deal with the effects of climate change (like drought), educate her kids, and send them to university,” he suggested.

Spending time, not money. A recent New York times/CBS News poll found that instead of spending money, Americans “are spending additional time with family and friends, gardening, cooking, reading, watching television and engaging in other hobbies.” See, we’re already taking steps away from consumerism towards communitarianism, which I got all excited about before Christmas in this post.   

Urban gardening  One of those backyard gardening places has begun in my town – a community-supported agriculture project that farms in its subscriber backyards and the farmers’ own yards. The farmers are still struggling financially because “it isn’t as income-producing as we’d like,” they say. Can you start one in your town – or maybe build community by creating a CSA on your block with your neighbors? Maybe add some chickens? 

Quit watering your lawn. Lawn watering uses more than half the water used by households in California. Sacramento has a campaign to turn off automatic sprinkler systems (especially in winter – for heaven’s sake, it’s raining!), and the Bay Area is looking at limiting lawns or landscapes to no more than 50 square feet per dwelling unit or no more than 25 percent of the landscaped area. The rest would have to be planted in native plants or plants requiring little or no water. Owners of upscale manors with millions in landscaping are not happy about this.   

Then mow your lawn with a goat.  Forget your push lawnmower. If you have more than an acre of land, you can rent goats to chomp your weeds and unwanted vegetation. You can hire 20 to 200, depending on the size of the project.

Save trees by changing toilet paper. Because we love ‘super soft’ toilet tissue, we consume 67.2 million trees annually.” How about saving a tree by using tissue made from post-consumer waste?

Talking about simple living in Oregon.  I’m honored to be speaking about simple living and global mission at the Oregon Synod Global Mission Event on February 6 in Milwaukie, Oregon. I hope to see you there!

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

At midnight last night, my brother, father, and I set off sparklers by the light of the blue moon.  Like a few million other people in our time zone, we counted down the minutes and then the seconds until the new year began.

New Year’s Eve used to be the only time of year we really thought in seconds. But as everything in our life speeds up—as work days extend to 24/7, as we tap our fingers impatiently for the few seconds it takes to download an email or a web page, as deadlines shorten to yesterday and demands on our present escalate—the seconds and minutes of our present moment are overwhelming our ability to think about the future. Just when we need to get to work creating one that doesn’t kill ourselves or our planet!

Many times when Christians talk about the future, they think about life after death. About 25 years ago, I was standing behind an ironing board in front of a Walgreen’s in Chicago, gathering signatures for an anti-nuclear petition. After listening to my heartfelt pitch, a young woman responded, “As Christians, shouldn’t we be hoping the world will end, so that the reign of Christ can begin?” In 1984, this left me speechless; now I would quote Bonhoeffer: “It may be that the day of judgment will dawn tomorrow; in that case, we shall gladly stop working for a better future. But not before.”

One way to enrich our ability to engage the future might be to begin the new year by contemplating the long, long, LONG view of the future espoused by the Long Now Foundation, formed to “provide counterpoint to today’s ‘faster/cheaper’ mind set and promote ‘slower/better’ thinking.” Its proposed 10,000 Year Clock “ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.” “The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time,” says cofounder Stewart Brand. (Remember the Whole Earth Catalog?)

A prototype of the 10,000 Year Clock in San Francisco (see the photo above) introduced me to the possibilities of seeing time as slow and spacious rather than fast and crowded. It seemed to fit nicely with Amitai Etzioni’s call for a cultural megalogue “about the relationship between consumerism and human flourishing,” which I got all excited about in this post. Changing our imagination of the future might change the way we value it, which in turn might change the way we live in our present, and help our society shift away from consumerism.

For how we see time has a lot to do with how we consume. In the New York Times, Damon Darlin recently noted that frugality—poor, maligned, unfashionable frugality—is actually the practice of an optimist. “If you expect good things in the future, you’re inclined to save money for that event. If you are a pessimist, you might as well spend everything now.”  Change the word money to environment, and these sentences still ring true.

Can you imagine how our day-to-day choices might impact the children of our children’s children’s children? My son is only 22. Being a grandmother is something I can hardly imagine. But if I start taking those distant progeny for granted, I might live differently.

Ten thousand years—are you ready?

Anne Basye, “Sustaining Simplicity”

Pulling out and washing shelves and crispers, wiping sticky bottles, checking expiration dates and putting everything back neatly in the refrigerator gives a person time to think. So I pondered lots of things yesterday, as I began to make good on my Christmas promise to give my sister a day of cleaning help.

I thought about my agenda, which is to get people to see things differently—to question why they are driving to a nearby store, or turning on a faucet and turning away to do something else, or buying something they don’t need—so they will imagine and practice alternatives like walking or car sharing, respecting water instead of wasting it, or considering the environmental and social impact of the entire lifecycle of a product instead of just exclaiming over its low, low price.

Those thoughts led me to remember an idea I once read about: the idea that a truly “advanced” society stops being mesmerized with tangible “stuff” and invests its assets in intangibles like education, personal development, the arts—so that instead of having homes full of extraneous gewgaws, we have fully developed and expressive people.

Someone has articulated this concept very concisely—someone whose ideas are in a folder in a banker’s box on a shelf in a shed on a farm in Washington State, along with all the rest of my stuff. Alas, that someone is still a mystery—but my internal musings on this subject triggered me to type “hierarchy of needs and consumerism” into the world’s favorite search engine, and lo and behold, up popped a FANTASTIC article along these lines: “Spent: America after Consumerism” by Amitai Etzioni, published in The New Republic last June. Click here to read the whole thing, or consider this Anne-made summary:

Responding to the current economic crisis, Etzioni says that reforming our economy requires us to get over consumerism (“the obsession with acquisition that has become the organizing principle of American life”) and internalize and act on a new “sense of how one ought to behave.” Etzioni’s two candidates for replacing consumerism are communitarian pursuits and transcendental ones.

To Etzioni, communitarianism means “investing time and energy in relations with the other, including family, friends, and members of one’s community” and includes community service. However, it’s not centered on altruism, but mutuality, “in the sense that deeper and thicker involvement with the other is rewarding to both the recipient and the giver.” (The two-way street of engagement is an important part of the methodology of mission called accompaniment that the ELCA uses in global mission.)

Transcendental pursuits are something Lutherans understand: “spiritual activities broadly understood, including religious, contemplative, and artistic ones.”

In order to urge people to skip the mall and go hiking or cook a meal together, we have to help people see that limiting consumption is not failure, but “liberation from an obsession.” And the way to do so is through “moral megalogues.” Etzioni says that societies are constantly engaged in mass dialogues over what is right and wrong that focus on one or two topics; recent topics include “the legitimacy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and whether gay couples should be allowed to marry.”  (Since June: health care.)

“Megalogues involve millions of members of a society exchanging views with one another at workplaces, during family gatherings, in the media, and at public events. They are often contentious and passionate, and, while they have no clear beginning or endpoint, they tend to lead to changes in a society’s culture and its members’ behavior,” says Etzioni.

What Etzioni calls “the megalogue about the relationship between consumerism and human flourishing” is just beginning, but could get much bigger if “public intellectuals, pundits, and politicians” started to focus the megalogue on this subject and invite people  “to reconsider what a good life entails.”

Forget the wine, the gift cards, the sweaters—this article is what I wanted for Christmas! Now I see how small individual steps, humble articles, blogs with small audiences, church basement discussion groups on simple living can ramp up a megalogue that can shift our society!

I close with my new hero, Professor Etzioni: “Societies shift direction gradually. All that is needed is for more and more people to turn the current economic crisis into a liberation from the obsession with consumer goods and the uberwork it requires– and, bit by bit, begin to rethink their definition of what it means to live a good life.”

Go tell it on the mountain, that Jesus Christ is born, and that the good life is about to be redefined!

Anne Basye,

A great communitarian activity: cooking New Year's Eve supper together

“Sustaining Simplicity”

It wasn’t just me who was cranky about gifts last Friday, aka Black Friday or Buy Nothing Day, depending on your point of view. Washington Post columnist George Will declared Christmas gift spending “a huge, value-destroying hurricane” and quoted Harriet Beecher Stowe, speaking in 1850: “There are worlds of money wasted, at this time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got.”

Will’s bottom line: Better to donate to causes and charities (hint: ELCA Good Gifts!), give gift cards, or just spend the money on ourselves, rather than purchase a gift that will have little value to the recipient!

George Will sees misdirected giving when he looks at Christmas gifts through an economic lens. Asking ourselves the perennial question, “How much is enough?” lets us detect and thwart consumer excess (how many sweaters, scarves, or ties can a person possibly need?). To see Christmas giving through an environmental lens, remember these facts from the American Society of Interior Designers: For every one truckload of goods manufactured, 32 truckloads of waste are produced… and 90 percent of everything manufactured in this country ends up landfills within one year.

As a reader of this blog about hunger, you’re probably already looking at Christmas gift-giving through a lens of social and economic justice. As a Christian, you’re probably looking at Christmas through a lens of generosity, a mark of the early Christian community. Of course, you’re also seeing Christmas as the birthday celebration of our beloved Jesus, not a credit-card and calorie bacchanal.

With those lenses in place, how are you living out creative, life-giving alternatives to an economically, environmentally, secular Christmas—without being stingy?

If you need a few ideas, you can find resources on simplifying the holidays here and here, review Sue Edison-Swift’s suggestions for “value-full” gifts here, and of course support ELCA ministries like World Hunger and Global Mission here.

I’m planning to give very small gifts made by local developmentally disabled artists…offer my stuff-sorting, stuff-organizing, and stuff-recycling skills to siblings and parents for projects they want tackled…participate in a multicultural La Posada celebration….write checks to World Hunger and a couple other favorite causes…and be a witness against mindless consumerism by living every single day of this Advent and Christmas season as my oddball, simple self.

Anne Basye, “Sustaining Simplicity”

Solidarity is a big piece of “accompaniment” – a way of engaging the world in mission which the ELCA defines as “Walking together in solidarity that practices interdependence and mutuality.”

It seems to me that we have at least two ways to walk together in solidarity with others we accompany. First, we can respect what they value. Second, we can try to understand the roots of their challenges, and then refuse to participate in behaviors that escalate those challenges.

Which brings us to a big uh-oh.

Theologian Cynthia Moe-Lobeda doubts that North Americans can actually accompany anyone authentically. At the recent ELCA Accompaniment Conference at Luther Seminary, she asked participants what it means for us Lutherans to accompany people “we are unwittingly or unknowingly killing” through our participation in an economic system she calls “life giving to us, but death dealing to others.”

She cited a woman strawberry picker in Central America who told her, “our children go hungry because this land grows strawberries for your tables,” and a community in India displaced from hereditary lands into urban poverty by bauxite mines that make aluminum for North American consumption.

Rather than examining our system to see how it harms others, she says, “We think our life is a good one, and we give thanks for it.” Professor Moe-Lobeda notes that while our hymns don’t typically thank God for material goods, our prayers do. “And a lot of those material goods are stolen goods.”

Welcome to the week we give thanks for our way of life, no matter what suffering it causes! Now what, as Christians and people concerned with hunger, shall we do?

Instead of reflexively thanking God for our lifestyle, can we reflect on how our prosperity harms the earth and others? Professor Moe-Lobeda believes that our faith calls us to recognize, name, and resist “social structural evils” that mean, for example, that a child born in North America will consume, waste and pollute in his or her lifetime as much as 50 children in developing countries.

Just being willing to question ways of life assumed to be good is a significant first step. Owning up to our complicity in the systems that support it—confessing that we participate and benefit—is a second step. Avoiding the temptation of shrugging our shoulders and declaring ourselves powerless to change anything is a third step. Seeking to create or nurture fairer alternatives is a fourth step.

That’s a lot of ground to cover over the mashed potatoes on Thursday. Since I’m not always tactful, I’ll probably focus on my fork and limit my efforts to leading a slightly less self-centered prayer.

Friday is another story! No early mall trips for me–I’ll be celebrating Buy Nothing Day, a holiday that helps me think about shopping and realize more deeply how tangled I am in our consumer economy. This year I’m hoping to be inspired to do less willful “not seeing” and creep a little closer to embracing what Professor Moe-Lobeda calls “the pan-human and inter-faith “great work” of our day: forging ways of living—at the household, institutional, and societal levels—that Earth can sustain and that build economically just inter-human relations.” [Read Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s ideas in this paper and this paper, and look for her title in the Lutheran Voices series, Public Church: For the Life of the World. Find some really radical ways to celebrate Buy Nothing Day, at home or with others, by clicking here or on the poster below.]

This year, let’s reconsider and redefine our blessings instead of counting them—and take a day to appreciate the world God has given us without using our credit cards. It could be revolutionary!

Anne Basye

“Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal”

To run a country, a seat of government has to have a permanent address.

Back in 1862, a flood transformed Sacramento into what papers called “a sort of a frontier Venice.” Early in January, said reporters, “Water in Sacramento was at such a depth that no one attempted to move about the city except by boat.” Governor Leland Stanford arrived at his inauguration in a rowboat. Ten days later, the State Treasurer’s office was under three feet of water, and “a piano in the parlor of the Chief Justice, though perched upon chairs, was soaked, and the pictures in the parlor were spoiled.”

On January 24, 1862, the government packed up and moved to San Francisco to finish out the legislature’s session. In the fall, everyone got back to work in a dried-out Sacramento, which has been the capital city ever since.

I’m not sure if Gov. Schwarzenegger has a flood contingency plan, but other governments are getting ready! Last month, the Prime Minister and cabinet of the Maldives donned scuba gear and met underwater. This month, Nepal’s cabinet will meet at the Mt. Everest base camp. Both governments are taking to the road to emphasize the perils they face from flooding caused by global warming—the Maldives, by sinking under the sea; Nepal, by melting glaciers.

These people are seriously worried. Me, too. While northern California’s reservoirs are dangerously low, Sacramento—still at sea level, still surrounded by levees, though they’ve gotten sturdier since 1862—is as vulnerable as New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina, my nephew asked my parents to put an ax in a second-floor closet so they could chop through their roof if they had to. If hundred-year rains and an early snow melt inundate Sacramento and send my parents to their roof, where will they send California’s government?

It’s astonishing to hear that the number of people who think that global warming is caused by humans is declining. Even though humans—and mostly humans living in North America—generate about 4 billion more tons of greenhouse gases than the earth can absorb! I’m hoping the big climate change conference happening in Copenhagen in December will turn that trend around.

Meanwhile, I’ll ride my bike, take the bus, and get that ax upstairs.

The cabinet of Maldives meets underwater

Anne Basye

“Sustaining Simplicity”

“You’re going to have to buy a car.”

That’s what everyone told me when they heard I was returning to the west coast. Sure, they said–it’s easy to live without a car in Chicago, surrounded by trains, buses, taxis, and car-sharing companies. But how can you do it out west?

To compensate for the embarrassing carbon footprint I stamped by moving 2300 miles in a low-mileage UHaul, I’ve gotten around Seattle and Portland, from Seattle to the town of Mt. Vernon 60 miles away, and from Mt. Vernon all the way to Sacramento on a combination of city and county buses, streetcars, light rail, and Amtrak. Figuring out routes and prices took a lot of research and asking questions, which, as a traveler, I was happy to do. But for people who drive every day, public transportation is like a second language. Convincing someone to learn it is work!

We’re glad to do it in Europe or New York City, consulting guidebooks and websites that translate the mysteries into vocabulary and gestures we comprehend. In our own hometowns, we’re more suspicious: Where do buses go? Who rides them? Are they safe? Don’t they take longer?

Tom Hampson of Church World Service answered these questions in Modesto, California. Twice a week, he gets to his office by bus, only five minutes later than he would in his car. The two buses I took between Seattle and Mt. Vernon were crowded with commuters who had done the legwork required to leave their cars at home. In Portland, the mayor wants 25 percent of commuters to use bicycles and buses; the one-two punch of Portland’s fine public transportation system and enlightened populace will help him succeed.

Learning the language and practice of public transportation could narrow the gap between the carbon dioxide humans emit every year (7 billion tons) and the CO2 that the earth’s natural processes can absorb (about 4 billion tons). Roughly 1.5 billion tons come from transportation; changes in our behavior can be significant.

In Everything Belongs, Father Richard Rohr says “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living; we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” Take the bus, and see what happens!

Anne Basye

“Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal”

When I decided to sell my home last winter, my stuff stopped being the pleasant backdrop to daily life and started demanding my attention. Beloved possessions became objects to sort, discard, bequeath, measure, and pack. Adding up self-storage fees, UHaul truck rental, and 8 miles per gallon of gas for 2300 miles, it cost quite a lot to move the five pieces of furniture and 67 boxes that survived this process of discernment from a dark self-storage unit in Chicago to a dark farm shed in Washington State.

From my extreme downsizing, I’ve learned exactly how much I have, and what it costs me. It’s left me with a sense that most of us North Americans have too much, and spend too much energy acquiring, caring for, and storing those things.

The doilies and antimacassars that cluttered our grandmothers’ homes have given way to gadgets, home electronics, and more contemporary gewgaws we think we can’t live without. Our garages are so stuffed with furniture, toys, sports equipment, and yard tools that cars can’t live in them anymore. We hold yard sales, but they don’t make a dent in our belongings because we fill our spaces with new bargains.

We do need tools for living, like the butter churn in the South Dakota sod house I visited on my road trip, or the laptop I’m typing on. And we cherish heirlooms that embody our family stories. But are there other, more creative and beneficial ways we could spend our energy than buying, selling, and tending stuff?

As a culture, we could produce less. According to the American Society of Interior Designers, 90 percent of everything manufactured in the U.S. ends up in a landfill in a year. No wonder Jared Diamond says much of American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to the quality of life.

As citizens and Christians (not consumers!), we could purchase more selectively, and free up space in our homes for hospitality to others or rest for ourselves.

We could have less individually, and share more things in common—a skill learned by young participants in the Lutheran Volunteer Corps and similar service projects.

And we could invest more energy in partnering with people in places that don’t have enough, so that together we can create a world in which we don’t suffer from too much and others don’t suffer from too little.

I’m looking forward to spending my energy on something besides my stuff. With everything in the shed, it’s just me and my suitcase. What will I learn next?

Anne Basye