Thanks you again for inviting me to join you in your sanctuary to speak with you on the subject of simple living. I am very happy to be able to participate and contribute to your service this morning.

When I think of simplicity, I think of a certain friend of mine, who happens to be a monk. He’s a bit of an orthodox monk and when I first met him about ten years ago, he said that he was occupationally not disposed towards the forming of friendships. And I took him at his word, but I see that as the years have worn on, like it or not, we seem to be friends.

At certain times over the past few years, I couldn’t help but notice that he was struggling with the path he had chosen for himself. Sometimes, I even wondered if being a monk was right for him. A few years ago, he seemed to be passing through phases of his inner development that was making him shake a bit. At this time, I was worried, but now I know it is as it should be. I think you call this being a ‘monk in battle.’

He once said to me, “One of the hardest things to give up is the urge to be a productive member of society. Some people are critical. They idealize the solitary life and imagine a day when they will go off and live in a cabin in the woods with only their note book. And even for those with the courage to break free, it’s amazing how quickly they find a reason to move back to town. It turns out that living a simple life is hard work.” And what he meant by hard work is not the chopping wood and carrying water that we sometimes associate with cabin life, what he meant was something quite different, that’s what I want to talk with you about this morning.

And I should say that when chuck asked me to speak about living simply, I had to recognize that I might not live quite so simply as he might think. But I confess that I have been afflicted with the dream of life in a cabin. It has visited me repeatedly throughout my life. And twice it has drawn me out of the safety of my routine, to give me a little taste of simplicity. True to what my friend had told me, I found them both pretty tough.

The first time the dream of living in a cabin got the best of me, it was here in Vermont. I had gone to live on a farm about five miles south of the border of Canada. And it was a perfectly good farm. It had a herd of about 30 head of Jersey cows. It had a farmer named Jack who was obsessed with tractors, And yes, it had a cabin. After about a month Jack asked me if I wanted to move in there and I saw that It had everything you might want in a cabin. A little pot belly wood stove, a bunk and a writing desk, and two big windows that looked out across a long field. Everything except a door. By the time Thanksgiving came around, I asked Jack for half a day off to hang a door on the cabin. And that turned out to be the right thing to do, because just as soon as I had put a door on the cabin, we had the most amazing snow storm. We got 5 feet of snow in two days. And then it began to blow. It blew up across the field and around my cabin to make the most amazing swale well over the roof of the cabin and leaving just enough room to walk around it. I had never seen anything like it before or since. And then there was another snowdrift ten feet tall between the main house and the milking shed. In those days, my life was very simple, and it was extremely beautiful, it was exactly what I had wanted. But something was not right. I was a little lonely, and we were working too hard, but something else as well. I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted to go back down to town.

I still remember the day. There was a black rotary phone in the milk room, and just before Christmas I mustered my courage to call about a paper-making internship that I had somehow managed to apply for and to my surprise learned they had space for me. The cows had all left the barn and there I was, all alone. standing in my yellow over boots, except that I wasn’t standing, I was jumping for joy.

The second time I had a brush with simplicity, I was in India, I wasn’t living in a cabin but in a concrete single bedroom, with a sink. That was even more simple. This time, there was no hot water and no washing machine, so I showered from a bucket and washed my robes by hand.

In that community, the early morning hours were prised and so every morning at 4:00, I would make the walk over to my office to write a page of text for a book we were making, (at that time I was writing for my keep.) before going to meditate. and breakfast and back to the office, and every day at 3:00, I would make my way back to my room for a cup of tea. In the second half of the year, I added peanuts that I roasted in a pan over a propane burner. I was surely living by the bells. I was as surrendered as I could be, but still resisting my situation quite a bit.

Once again, I had pinned so hard to get to india, to a place of simplicity and prayer, but when I got there, I was thinking about going home. While I was in my room sipping my afternoon tea, not far from the banks of the holy ganges river, I imagined the glossy billboards, the perfume ads, the cloth seat cushions in the airport terminal. As if getting finally to my terminal gate was like arriving finally at the gates of heaven. And this time I noticed that something among all the simplicity, among the incense and robes and bells, something was at war within me. It was a beautiful year, but it was excruciating to experience such longing to get away. In those days, I too was a monk in battle. And so, once again I went back to town, this time I went home to the Town of White River Junction, Vermont.

Now, today, it is not only or our idealization of cabin life that is promoting the idea of simple living. There is a kind of moral side to it too. Now, we have 401 carbon parts-per-million hanging in the atmosphere. And now we have learned about overshoot in our patterns of consumption.

For those who don’t know, the calculation regarding overshoot goes something like this. There are currently about 33 billion acres of biologically productive land on the planet and approximately 7.4 billion people. In other words, the fair share of each individual is approximately four and a half global acres of land.

Through a process called ecological footprinting, we know that the average resident of the United States consumes the cumulative output of 23 global acres of land. This means that on an average day, the average American consumes over five times their fair share of the earth’s bounty. If everyone on the planet consumed at this level, we would need five earth-sized planets to support us all. Fortunately, this is not the case. For example, the average resident of India is living off of only 2 global acres, less than half of their rightful per capita allotment.

But if you take the planet as a whole, we are deep into the territory of overshoot, borrowing from the future, acrewing a debt, in the form of reduced fertility and climate disruption, a debt that one day we will need to pay back . . . Which brings us back to the experience of what we come up against during our days of living simply.

Recently, I had the opportunity of attending a fairly rigorous spiritual practice retreat. It took place in California, so I had to get onto an airplane to get there. Once again we were getting up at 4:00 am and were engaged in a pretty intensive series of practices, yoga, breathwork, meditation throughout the day. Once again, after a couple of days, I was starting to suffer. My mind was squirming this way and that to try to find a way out of the fix it was in. And once again, my mind was beginning to glorify airports, the Los Angeles International Airport to be exact. with the same sense of glory and idealization.

Except that this time, I was starting to get suspicious, because I happened to notice that when I am actually sitting in an airport, something that I do as infrequently as possible, I have to admit that it’s not all that great. In that moment, it’s not something I actually enjoy at all. My idea of airports are like heaven but my actual experience of airports something altogether different.

So, if I was not longing for airports because I actually like them, maybe I have been just longing for it because it represents an escape. Escape from what? There are lots of trite answers that you hear from time to time. I could say, escape from the present moment, escape from myself, escape from something arising inside of myself.

But to truly answer this question, I want to introduce you to someone else who I consider a friend. Actually, someone that I met so recently that I wouldn’t dare admit to her that I consider her a friend. She is not a nun. She is a mighty activist and an indigenous rights lawyer and a member of the Penahwabskek tribe, of the Penobscot Nation. Her name is Sherri Mitchell and one week ago, she told me something that I want to share with you. She told me about an experience she had while sitting on her lawn. This is what she said, “As I was sitting there, I noticed a tiny ant crawling across a blade of grass. As I watched the ant move along, his little body began to light up. Then, the blade of grass that he was walking on lit up. As I sat there and watched, the entire area surrounding me began to light up. I slowly raised my eyes and the entire field became illuminated, as did the trees that sat on the other side of the field lining the forest. Every bird that flew into my line of vision had an added layer of light surrounding it. I sat very still, quietly marveling over this new found sight, afraid to move and lose it. While I sat there observing my newly illuminated world, I noticed something intriguing. The field of light that I was seated in was rising and falling in unison. As I watched, the Earth breathe around me, I felt my own breathing fall into harmony with it. Everything became sharper; all of my senses came alive. While I sat there breathing with the world around me, the firm lines of my being began to fade. I felt myself expanding and merging with all that I was observing. There was suddenly no separation between myself, the ant, the grass, the trees and the birds. We were breathing with one breath, beating with the pulse of one heart. I was consumed by this achingly beautiful and complete sense of kinship with the entire creation. This single moment of open awareness allowed all of the teachings that I had been raised with to sink deeply into my heart. I got it.”

Now, do you suppose this “complete sense of kinship with all of creation” that is contained in “all of the teachings” that she had been raised with is a delusion, and that actually the separated out world of conventional consciousness that we live in is the true reality of this world?

Love says no. Compassion says no, and even the intrinsic human striving for what is better over what is worse ultimately says no. No, the real world is the world of our unity with all of creation, and it is the separateness of our current mindset that is our delusion. And this is what makes our lives so precarious. We have to exert so much energy to maintain a sense of separateness that is ultimately destined to fall apart.

And I suppose it is fair to say delusion, rather than illusion because we are complicit. Not that we should be blamed. How could we be otherwise. Non-separation or non-duality is easy to talk about, but when it actually comes knocking, it is not easy. When the true nature of this world finally comes knocking it brings with it the end of our understanding of our sense of self. It brings with it a kind of death. The death of ego.

When we approach this from the perspective of our conventional understanding of ourselves as separate from one another, separate from this world, our intrinsic will to live must fight back. It must push back whatever is bringing up this threat. Or we will shake with a divided allegiance between these two worlds. Then we will shake like ‘monks in battle.’

And it is with the objects of this world that ego fights back. The will to consume, the desire to experience something different, the overwhelming desire to be at the gates of heaven at the Los Angeles International Airport. Or anywhere other than the silence, the stillness that feels like death itself. Of course the Airport Gate is not the Gate of heaven. The gate of heaven is what we are turning away from.

I suppose there is a basic headline here. I hesitate to sum this all up, because I don’t want to sound preachy. But we must find our path to sustainability. That which is not sustainable, by definition will not continue on. So I sometimes like to say that if you are on the side of sustainable culture, you are on the winning team. Though it may seem hopeless, that which is sustainable will ultimately prevail.

But I don’t believe in a path to sustainability that runs through a sense of obligation, or idealization, or guilt. You may try these things. But for my part, I doubt they will work. Instead, I believe in a path to sustainability that runs through the booming simplicity and silence of a moment in which we are not separate from one another, in which we are not separate from the world in which we live. And though this moment may present itself as something fearful, as a kind of death, a death of ego, I don’t see another way forward. Whether we call it the way of the cross, or the path of enlightenment, whether we say salvation or liberation, I don’t see a short cut. The path to the survival of our race is through the transformation of consciousness. And I believe in the transformation of consciousness. I see it all around me. For this reason, I have hope.

Simon Denis