Simple Life

Marian Van Eyk McCain, right, a retired psychotherapist and health educator who lives "in voluntary simplicity" in Hartland, North Devon, believes that those of us whose childhood pre-dates the consumer culture can help heal our society's ills by building a remembered simplicity back into our lives.

When my grandmother was the age I am now, the heart of my home town, Plymouth, was torn out by war. From our back windows, we watched the old city burn - a sea of fire that seemed unreal, impossible, an event beyond imagining. The images from those times are vivid still: the tin hats; the gas masks; the thankful prayers when morning dawned and our house still stood; or when one of the rare letters, scissored by the army censor, came from my faraway father.

Yet strangely, despite the ration books, the powdered eggs, the utterly disgusting margarine and the absence of so many things the grown-ups missed, my childhood world seemed full of treats. There were sandwiches made of parsnips with artificial banana flavouring, and squishy mint balls rolled in dried milk powder. We had home-made Cornish pasties, deftly shaped by Grandma's expert fingers, delicious, wonderful potato cake on Sunday afternoons, saffron buns, and glasses of full-flavoured cider that came in re-usable glass bottles with pop-off stoppers that squeaked and clattered against their necks. There were flowers and home-grown vegetables in the garden, and plump loganberries ripened on the fence. In Central Park there was a pond, and in Spring I brought home frog spawn in a jar and raised tadpoles in a shady corner by the Anderson shelter.

My grandparents, my mother, and the extended family beyond them, cherished and sheltered me throughout those years, soothed my fears, shaped my world. And, despite the war, it was an amazingly good world, crammed with simple joys - Sunday dinners, Dartmoor picnics, blackberry- picking expeditions, gardening, listening to the radio - where the severe scarcity of things served only to heighten our enjoyment of what we had.

I have tried, for years, to find a word that completely expresses the sweet, joyful fullness of that kind of simple, close-boundaried life, but nothing captures it. However, it is that feeling, never fully named nor expressed, which informs and shapes my adult choices.

When I look around me now at our glutted, bored, wasteful, consumer culture, I find myself tracking back along the years, searching for the point at which the excited release from wartime deprivation and the welcoming back of exotic items like oranges and bananas turned into an insatiability, a greedy grasping for more and more and more until there seemed no boundary any longer - and nothing left to savour. (If strawberries are available year-round, where's the excitement of tasting the first one in June?)

Whenever I talk or write about the deep joy of simplicity, the intense pleasure that can come from having only what you absolutely need and no more, I often despair that I come across sounding like some stuffy, no- dancing, bible-reading-all-Sunday evangelist.

Jeremy Seabrook put this difficulty very well in an article he wrote for the Jan/Feb 2002 issue of New Internationalist. Explaining how modern capitalism has appropriated all the culture's images of 'the good life' in order to sell it back to us, packaged, he wrote: "The promise of riches without end to satisfy limitless desire makes alternative visions of a modest plenty, a comfortable security, look thin and austere by comparison."

That's why, when I write about the simple life, I always focus on the delight factor. I speak of the sensory pleasures of planting, tending, picking and cooking one's own, wholesome, organic food; the companionable peacefulness of a cottage living room where the wood burner, not TV, is the centre and focus of the room; and the soaring joy of DIY music.

I believe that deep within those of us over the age of 40, who managed to live out most of our childhoods before the modern era of excess, of pre-packaged 'infotainment', McDonalds on every corner, bubble-wrapped plastic toys and total Disneyfication of the minds of children, there are intact memories of simple, home-made pleasures and the enjoyment of sufficiency. It is up to us to mine those memories and use them to construct a better world.

In my new book, Elderwoman, I have written:
"In another 30 years, how many people still alive will remember how nice it was to have all one's phone calls answered by a live person, to have a bank teller who knew your name, to get away to a place where no phones ever ring, and to be able to buy buttons or picture hooks loose instead of in packets of five or 10 (when you needed six or 12)?

Just as heirloom varieties of vegetables are being lost in this modern world of seed patenting, hybridization and genetic manipulation, so are many of the valuable ideas, methods and values of yesterday being lost from contemporary memory.

We, the elderwomen, are the seed-savers. It is up to us to ensure that the true treasures of our culture are preserved for future use. Just as my grandmother used to salt down beans for the winter, we too have to preserve, in our daily lives, things which we know to be deeply nourishing to the human body and soul and work to throw out things which we know to be destructive and harmful to ourselves, our loved ones, our communities or Earth herself.

But rather than attempting to turn back the clock, let us move forward, using every ounce of knowledge, wisdom, creativity and skill at our disposal to help construct a world which incorporates the best of the past with the achievements of the present and the vast potential of the future. A world which is based, for the first time in history, on the perfect balance and integration of the yin and the yang, the masculine and the feminine, the body, the mind, the heart, the soul and the spirit."

I am now the age my grandmother was when Plymouth burned. Around me - around us all - new fires rage. It is up to us all, this time, to put them out.



Marian Van Eyk McCain is a retired psychotherapist and health educator who lives in "voluntary simplicity" in Hartland, North Devon, with her partner, Sky. She has published articles on many topics, ranging from personal development to alternative technology, and writes a book review column for Resurgence. Her first book, Transformation through Menopause, was published by Bergin & Garvey in NY in 1991. Her new book Elderwoman is being published in March 2002 by Findhorn Press. For more information, visit Marian's website at www.elderwoman.org.