Simple living is every bit as great as anyone ever said. But it’s not as easy as most think. That’s something I discovered, you might say, the hard way.
Take one of our recent family campfire evenings, for instance. We relished the simple pleasure of grilling ribs over an open fire under a comfortably cool, moonless but star-filled evening. The nine of us laughed, roasted the ends of sticks, and petted the family golden retriever. I wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that those two hours were idyllic. But it came at the cost of what we endured for the several hours before that.
So they could parboil the ribs and prep the evening veggies, my wife and teenage daughters shoveled out cooking space from the day’s previous meals, fruit and vegetable preserving, and assorted other activities in our Grand Central Kitchen. I corralled our three youngest—complete with their ever-present special needs ranging from mild autism to Down syndrome—to ready the outdoor venue. We piled a month’s worth of empty, burnable animal feed bags from the porch into the pick-up, along with buckets for water and a couple of Tiki torches. Then we headed to the barn area (a half mile down the driveway and up the road) for more empty bags, camping chairs from the storage building, and shovels from the barn. That done, we drove back past the house to our upper field, as we call it, where several years ago my second son spent countless hours clearing a picturesque spot alongside the creek for campouts and campfires.
I cajoled the youngsters into dragging branches from the tree line out to the burning pit where I busied myself unloading the dredgings from house and barn. I glanced periodically back toward the house to gauge my wife’s progress milking the cow, so I could time the start of the fire to be sure coals were ready when she arrived with the ribs. About dusk, my team and I lit the fire. Our timing was just right, and ribs made the grill top just before it got too dark to see them.
So: Idyllic evening? Delightful setting? The feeling of a charmed existence? You bet. I wouldn’t trade that simple evening by the fire for any blockbuster entertainment either coast could conjure. But getting there wasn’t easy. And that’s what makes it such a perfect metaphor for “simple country living.”
The Difficult Beginnings of Simplicity
When Southeasterners Nancy and I first married, we shared the adventure of living for four years in California. Fairly sure our stay on the left coast would be temporary, we took in all the western scenery we could get to. As many weekends as not we spent on the road, camping in one exotic setting or another. We felt as at home in the Angeles Crest Mountains and Sequoiah National Park as we did at our apartment in downtown Pasadena.
Friends marveled at our activity level, mostly because they couldn’t fathom going to all the trouble we did loading our gear and driving several hours “just to get away.” But if the exhilaration of mountain air didn’t assure us of the rightness of our cause, the despair upon returning to smog and crowds on Sunday evening always did. Yes, it was hard to enjoy the “simple” pleasure of roughing it in the mountains, but every tent fold and camping checklist was worth the trouble.
Simple Spirituality the Hard Way
Fascinated as I am by monasteries, it’s tempting to think of them as the world’s greatest bastions of simple living. Ah, the sublime reward of daily prayers and companionship with like-minded saints. Daily prayers, yes, but what about the nightly ones? While monastic schedules usually begin at what most of us would consider an ungodly hour, I learned recently of a community that sets the benchmark for hardness in this mode of simple living.
Eighty miles southeast of Phoenix, in the desolate but breathtaking seclusion of the Sonoran Desert, monks at St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery are up and at ‘em every morning of every day (yes, that’s seven—count ‘em 7 days a week) in time to begin the “daily” prayer regimen at 1:45. And even if the individual monks are relatively penniless, monasteries as a whole absolutely cannot be. Monks the world over spend days in hard work—making fine cheeses and wines (praise be), training dogs, publishing books, crafting giftwares, maintaining retreat centers, counseling, serving other churches and the indigent. A high price for a simple life.
Get Perspective, Not a Complex
It takes discipline and work to live simply. I’ve spent a long time learning that just because a pursuit is hard doesn’t mean I’m doing something wrong. Often, in fact, the things that provide the greatest reward are the most demanding.
Moving out of town, growing at least some of your own food, starting a business can be pretty tough undertakings—even if the reward includes many of life’s great simple pleasures. So if you’re thinking of making a move to the country or are already there and wondering what you’ve gotten yourself into, just make sure your perspective is right as you pursue the simple life: “Simple” does not equal “easy,” but getting there is worth the effort.
Creative Country Views 