On a luminous April morning in 1986, a young couple arrived from Los Angeles at an old farmhouse on a Blue Ridge mountainside in Carroll County, Virginia. In long rows radiating from the house, cherry, peach, and apple trees bloomed in velvety shades of white and pink—a vast sea of blossoms washing against a shoreline of ancient blue mountains stretching to the far horizon. We were that couple. That sloping Blue Ridge mountainside, its ancestral houses, legendary orchard, and the surrounding communities in southwest Virginia and northwest North Carolina were our new home.
This book—one of the fruits of that dramatic change in our lives—tells what many people have described since its first printing in 1992 as a classic tale: with the aid of family, friends, and guides as familiar as Henry David Thoreau and Helen and Scott Nearing, two people embark on the grand adventure of personal change. With adventure comes uncertainty, and a certain degree of risk, but we were determined to simplify our lives; to face any obstacle, any challenge that stood in the way of creating the personal freedom and enduring sense of meaning that are the savory fruits of a simpler life.
Three years after our arrival at Levering Orchard, the idea for a book on simple living itself seemed to pose an insurmountable obstacle. “Simple living—what’s that, and who would want it?” was the refrain from a chorus of New York publishing houses, responding to our queries proposing a book on the subject. The year 1989 marked the end of a decade of material extravagance, a high-rolling, self-aggrandizing era marked by an insatiable appetite for more. One brave publishing house—Viking/Penguin—caught the vision of an idea that proposed true wealth in the form of a simpler, more meaningful life. Pioneers at the beginning of a new decade, we wrote Simple Living as if journeying westward in a Conestoga wagon, our sights on the bona-fide prosperity of a more fulfilling life, but always aware of the slings and arrows of skeptics, of a hidebound Old Guard that divined only starry-eyed idealism in pioneering.
Time, as it turned out, favored the pioneers rather than the naysayers. Indeed trend watchers say that Simple Living helped launch what has become a vast and rising national tide of interest in simplicity. As longtime champions of what was once a lonesome idea, we’ve seen that tide bringing renewed hope and spirit to every corner of our self-renewing nation, a tide that withstands the cynicism of shrewd marketers cloaking the same old material excess in words like “simple” and “simplicity.” Simple living, as an ideal, has proven stronger than those who would exploit it for wholly commercial ends. In every city in the country, let alone the small towns and rural areas that have been the traditional bastions of the simple life, Americans are finding ways to satisfy their yearnings for more time—time for family, time for community involvement, time to express their creative impulses and to rediscover who that person really is who’s buried beneath those piles of overwork and things. A vast emergence—from the oppression of bigger, better and more stuff, from outmoded definitions of what makes for genuine success—is taking place before our eyes, in churches and synagogues and mosques, in simplicity circles, in lifestyle choices large and small across the entire social spectrum of our country. We hear it every day, from Americans across our nation: “I want to live by my values.” Our mantra has become “Nothing’s too small to make a difference.”
Call it a renaissance. Or better yet, a flowering. Simplifying your life takes time, not only for an individual, but also for like-minded individuals working together, not to mention an entire culture. But it can and does happen. Each person goes about it in his or her own way; simplicity has many expressions. But, every day, in thousands of success stories, human lives are growing simpler and more meaningful.
Our work and our growing relationship with a wide circle of leaders in the fields of simplicity, environmental protection, and betterment nationally and internationally have led us into the terrain of television. In 1998, Wanda was invited to host a nationally broadcast Public Broadcasting Service primetime special, Escape from Affluenza. That program, along with its prequel, Affluenza, proved tremendously successful with a highly influential and desirable national television audience. Not long after, we set about developing a television series to educate viewers about the benefits of environmental stewardship, thoughtful consumption, community involvement, and financial responsibility.
As writers and educators, we see that simplicity unfolds much like fruit trees emerging from the armored dormancy of winter: first green tips of leaves appear, then diaphanous blossoms spread their wings and, finally, pale green fruit ripens into a cherry or peach or apple. Triggered by the promise of spring, the tight bud of habit and convention gives way to a stirring from within. In the longer and warmer light of a better way to live, the bud becomes the blossom of even better things to come. Time —and the innate power of potential—creates the alchemy of change, the ripening, the richness of harvest. Steeped in the sun, a life becomes what it was naturally meant to be.
Many springs—and many harvests—have come and gone since we first arrived in that “sea of blossoms,” but the story this book tells packs an even greater sense of urgency now than when Simple Living was first published. Not only is “time a-wasting” —if you’re still yearning to simplify—but our fragile planet hears the apocalyptic tick of a ticking clock even more now than it did in 1992. People of good will may deny them, but two facts remain for those with the eyes to see and the courage not to blink. First, global warming, resource depletion, and the progressive loss of natural ecosystems threaten the future of life, as we know it on our planet. Second, there is a direct and, as yet, largely under-appreciated connection between personal lifestyle choices and threats to our environment. This is particularly true in the United States, where about 5 percent of the earth’s population accounts for approximately 25 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions, and where, since 1960, Americans have consumed more resources than the entire human race on earth before that date. Without the kind of thoughtful lifestyle decisions implicit in simpler lives, Planet Earth’s life-sustaining systems are likely, over time, to collapse.
Simple Living—the book itself and the philosophy it embraces—suggests options available to everyone that can lead simultaneously to personal and planetary growth. In steps large and small, it simply is possible to make a difference in the ever-widening circles that define our lives, moving outwards from personal and family life to life in our community, our nation, and the planet. People do matter. For the sake of our young son Henry, for the sake of children everywhere, we simply must take action to bring about change.
It is our hope that this book will inspire every reader—to begin the sweet journey of paring down or to reinforce your commitment to a journey already underway. Many people, over the years, have inspired us: the examples of simple living icons, the support and camaraderie of like-minded family members and friends. In this book you will see, once again, the powerful ripple effect of people influencing people, how the hope of a better life can lead to a life we truly want to live. Our book is an open invitation for you to join us. Not by copying the lives we’ve created (that couldn’t be done, of course), but by making the choices uniquely yours to make.
Frank Levering & Wanda Urbanska