Free Twelve by Twelve by Micahel Powers Page A

and Adams County’s other quirky characters. They weren’t going to give up their electricity, piped water, and plumbing, but they left still asking questions, and they drove home questioning. Gwen told me later they still sometimes puzzle over the riddle of Jackie’s 12 × 12.
    As they were leaving I felt happy, centered, and energized. Yes, their cell phones had gone off during the evening, but it hadn’t bothered me. It was simply part of who they were. Then, under the stars, my mind wandered to my past ten years of work in the Global South, and I felt a pang of guilt over what I’d often been doing: punishing people for living sustainably, for living like this. Sure, at times I’d been shipping food and medicines to people on the edge of starvation — in postwar countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia. But in other projects my own ethnocentricity over what it means to “live better” allowed me to drive a fancy white jeep into subsistence communities — ones that already had enough — and preach the gospel of Ever More. Subtle, to be sure. I wasn’t preaching shopping malls and superhighways, but rather better clinics and schools, more efficient agriculture, the standard aid fare, the rhetoric of conventional Western wisdom. But isn’t the end result of all that to turn “them” into “us”?
    A shooting star blazed across the sky, its ember trail leaving an afterglow. Looking up into the heavens, I considered a fundamental question: Is the modern project, the flattening world, ultimately leading us to greater happiness, health, and environmental sustainability? There’s so much we can learn from the cultures of the Global South. I thought of Honamti, on the bank of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, his world circling in three ways. That day he also told me about the Aymara idea of “living well.” He said the Aymara do not seek to improve their lot in a material sense. The idea is not to live better, but to live well : friends, family, healthy body, fresh air and water, enough food, and peace. Jackie joked once that she was “downwardly mobile.” A lot of people would call her poor. But perhaps she had consciously scaled back from the paradigm of living better — with its high levels of environmental destruction, collective anxiety, and personal depression — to living well, something more akin to Aristotle’s golden mean, the lovely midpoint, where many in the world still live, and live quite well.
    FOR JACKIE, SIMPLICITY ISN’T A PURITANICAL ASCETICISM. It’s not about denial; rather, it’s a creative process. Jackie isn’t trying to inspire people to live 12 × 12. She told me once that those are the correct dimensions of her life, as a single person with grown children. Those who live with families, with kids and relatives, the majority of people, obviously require larger dimensions. So, where is the point of enough for each of us?
    For me at the 12 × 12, “enough” definitely included a car. Absolutely. No doubt about it. Isolated deep in the country without electricity, water, phone, or an internet connection (though I did bring a laptop for writing), I needed a car for pragmatic reasons as well as to provide a kind of emotional escape valve from so much nature. Still, I found myself inclined to bike everywhere. I’d brought along a twenty-six-dollar used three-speed I’d picked up in a thriftshop in Chapel Hill. Most days I’d bike up and down Jackie’s lane with Kyle Thompson; I also began using it to go to the post office in Pine Bridge, and the shop in Smithsville, four miles up the road, or ten miles into Siler City. The bike became a way to exercise my body and to lift my spirits. Instead of being cocooned in plastic and metal, insulated from the world, I was flying free, fully exposed to the sun and wind and the grit of life. Instead of the angry groan and poisoned cough of a combustion engine, I had silence and the constant respiration and heartbeat of a living world.
    The car