Seasonal simplicity sermonette

By Stephanie Mills

Sun contributor

Earlier this year, a group of friends asked me to speak at their regular winter gathering, whose theme was “Pleasure, Presence, and Play.”

It was some wild genius on their part to redirect our focus from the cruel spectacle unfolding in the nation’s capital, and other portents of collapse, and to turn our attention to conviviality. (It was also fairly playful to ask a depressive pessimist to address such a lively theme.) The following essay is derived from that talk.

The gathering included folks who are of an ilk to find ways through the coming dark times by living close to the earth and, through restoration work, making amends to the forests and watersheds, developing subsistence skills, sharing sustenance, and being inventive, poetic and courageous. There were music makers proclaiming a fierce and luminous vision, voicing heartfelt truths. Free-range kids rampaging around.

Our neck of the woods is hospitable to their kind but year-round, celebrations, picnics, reunions, and campouts can be occasions for individuals and communities to delight in one another and the gathering as a whole, and manifest mutual aid as festivity. Those fun times take some team work.

It’s high summer now, the season we look to for peak pleasure and unfettered play. There is nothing like a simple good time. Simplicity, in this complicated, consumerist civilization, can take some conscious effort.

I was invited to give that winter talk on account of a book I wrote more than 20 years ago, Epicurean Simplicity. It’s so old that it was written on a typewriter by someone without an internet connection, a smartphone or email.

An editor suggested that I write about “Voluntary Simplicity,” which has long been a tenet of the ecology movement. You remember the slogans: “Live simply so that others may simply live,” and “Want not, lack not.”

My first pass at the subject was high-minded, preachy, and boring. But reading Richard Gregg’s famous essay on Voluntary Simplicity was liberating. In it, Gregg said that in 1925, Gandhi told him that, “As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, you should keep it. If you were to give it up in a mood of self-sacrifice, or out of a stern sense of duty, you would continue to want it back, and that unsatisfied want would make trouble for you.” It is willingness that makes the simplicity voluntary, and possibly enjoyable.

In pursuit of congenial simplicity, I decided to get real, go off duty, consult the seasons, and hark to the senses. First, last, and always, they are the prime pathways of authenticity, ever more so in a time when AI proponents are swamping media with synthetic slop.

Meanwhile, I chanced on a gorgeous exposition of Epicurean philosophy in a used copy of Lucretius’ first century B.C. Roman poem, “On the Nature of Things,” and thus was led to the third century B.C. Greek philosophy of Epicureanism. Epicureans were materialists who deemed sensation to be the touchstone of truth. They construed pleasure as being an absence of the pains of excess and attachment.  Epicureanism has nothing to do with fine dining—Epicurus and his companions were pleased with barley porridge, plain water, and meaningful conversations in their gardens.

Such pleasures, those of friendship above all, were the means and ends of the good life. An Epicurean, said one author, is “a rational and reflective seeker for happiness,” for whom “Pleasure extended as a habit of mind through life.” As a contemporary Epicurean website explained, pleasure can be a practice of awareness and gratitude, discerning “choices and avoidances.”

Finding the joy in work, in camaraderie, in family, in culture, in more-than-human nature, and in repose can be a sure sign of the good, of right choice or action. Now more than ever, we need to decommodify pleasure. The less paraphernalia our pleasure entails, the profounder it will be. Pleasure can be a small and simple thing; a moment, a gratitude, a perception, an awareness.

Now is the time for us good creatures to assert the authority of our embodied senses, to reclaim pleasure from consumerism, and to locate pleasure in rapt attention to beauty. To wonder and to revel in the gift of life. Take some time every day to be amazed by our evolutionary endowment: Fingertips! Taste buds! Feet and legs! Eyesight! Sense of smell! Hearing! Touch!

The ability to take pleasure in simple things is an act of resistance. It’s about preserving our wildness within while honoring the wild wonder and beauty without. Savoring and appreciating, if just in the moment, elemental things like breathing, laughter, and loving kindness is to move beyond survival to wholeness and freedom. It’s a worthwhile commitment.

Stephanie Mills is an author and teacher who’s lived in southeast Leelanau County since 1984. To learn about her work, visit www.smillswriter.com.