Essay: When Enough Is Enough
© Marina Schauffler
The crows in our neighborhood live for Wednesdays. Since the town mandated that trash be collected in labeled plastic bags, few people use garbage cans. By mid-morning Wednesdays, the crows have gone from house to house like trick-or-treaters, digging into bags and pulling out goodies. Their garbage fest leaves a flurry of plastic wrap and paper towels strewn across driveways and yards.
The crows are unrepentant. Like our own species, they are shrewd opportunists. They want their food rich, fast and cheap. No sense hunting and foraging in the woods when the neighborhood provides compost-pile franchises and trash-bag outlets.
Even as I collect tissues and wrappers from the front lawn, I can't begrudge the crows their indulgence. I admire their confidence and cunning. Yet among my own kind, I find this talent for consumption markedly less endearing. What is the difference? Why does the crows' behavior seem innocuous, even admirable, while human gluttony sparks condemnation?
This double standard could be taken as evidence of a misanthropic impulse or a vestigial Puritanism quick to decry wanton decadence. But the issue is more basic than that. Where the crows excel and we stumble is in knowing the value of limits. The crows are resourceful at finding food but they don't take more than they need. They know, instinctively, when enough is enough.
For all our sophistication in modern culture, we have lost this basic intuition. We've grown so adept at consumption we have trouble distinguishing genuine needs from spurious desires. The ersatz world of advertising only deepens our confusion. Each year, the ad industry spends 160 billion dollars drenching us in images crafted to whet our essential hunger for joy, conviviality and belonging. Yet the real "goods" we're sold -- the cigarettes, cosmetics and cars -- prove hollow and corrosive substitutes.
Bait-and-switch advertising lures us to buy far more than we need or even want. As we accumulate goods, we lose time. Each week, on top of 40-60 work hours, Americans spend (on average) six hours shopping and nine hours driving. As the pace of life accelerates, the centrifugal forces to buy more and do more pull us off-center. We lose a grounding in what matters most.
A counterbalance to consumption lies in the more-than-human world. Outdoors in the unpaved places, the static of commercial culture fades. In the quiet that follows comes a sense that could never be bought. It can't even be fairly described.
Each morning, upon rising, I go to where a windblown oak stands. Its stone-gray trunk splays into a disheveled tangle of half-dead branches. Resting a shoulder on rutted bark, I let my senses waken.
Lichen forms a pastel green collage on the trunk. Buds like water droplets mark nearby birch boughs. A spatter of snow stirs oak leaves. From a dark expanse of pines comes the throaty gargle of raven.
Here the threads that hold together the whole are palpable. Oak, birch, raven, human, lichen -- each part of a kaleidoscope turned faithfully by sun and moon. The mesmerizing patterns of shifting light, wind and weather. The order in chaos. The mystery of the mundane. In this place and this moment, enough is enough.
To sense this elemental kinship is to know grace. To hold it within, and live by it, is to know discipline.
The delight of kinship carries with it a demand. Being reminded each morning of all we belong to, I cannot live a disconnected life. The choice to honor ecological ties does not stem from moral duty or a concern for the "rights" of other species. The underlying ethic is not derived from Kantian imperatives, Aristotelian virtues or Utilitarian calculations.
It is an ethic born of care. It comes from knowing other species -- not as taxonomic types, but as individuals and communities. This knowledge depends upon focused time and attention. A practice of ecological kinship can be likened to the Buddhist concept of "mindfulness," which counsels us to be fully present, attentive to where we are and what we are doing.
Our attention to the natural world yields unexpected gifts -- moments of beauty and symmetry that nourish our deepest hungers. Yet the same attention brings anguish, as we see how our actions rend the fabric of life.
The torn shards lie all about. A cancerous sun burns down, its shield dissolved by our automotive alchemy. The spring grows silent as warblers decline, evicted from their habitat in both hemispheres. And along our highways lie the crushed and crumpled bodies of countless creatures we call "roadkills." What do their deaths say about our lives?
To dwell with open eyes and open heart in the midst of ecological devastation is a spiritual discipline. Each instance of destruction, in the larger world calls us back to our own practice. The size of our ecological wake depends on the myriad daily choices we make -- what we buy, what we eat, what we drive; how much we buy, how much we eat, how much we drive.
For each of us, the choices will differ. And they will change over time. We can never eliminate our wake, only minimize it through conscientious practice.
As my sense of ecological kinship grows, my choices gradually change. I find myself traveling less by car and more by bike; choosing organic food and second-hand clothing; shopping less and savoring more time outdoors. I have decided not to upgrade either my ten-year-old computer or ten-year-old car (my television, of the same vintage, was given away years ago). By avoiding commercial radio and publications, I've found one can elude many of the 1,500 advertising images aimed at us daily.
These choices carry no sense of deprivation. In fact each affirms the value of sufficiency over surfeit. My life is less cluttered by gadgetry that demands maintenance, styles that go out of fashion, and "time-savers" that devour more time than they free.
Even my perception of time is changing. It no longer seems like a scarce commodity to be rationed. Time has become more fluid and cyclical, a pattern at once reassuring and mysterious. There is enough time now to dwell in timeless moments -- when saffron light floods the room at sunset; when cascading blooms of Christmas cactus emerge; when a letter from a friend arrives, carrying stories of a faraway life.
The more I glimpse the full breadth of living time can hold, the harder it gets to return to conventional measures, days dictated by timesheets and overtime. Ecopsychologist Robert Greenway encountered a similar response when he led groups of corporate employees on wilderness trips. The employees loved the expeditions. The firms did not. Greenway was told the trips would have to end: after their wilderness stay, too many employees had returned to work only long enough to give notice.
Greenway's story confirms that even a brief immersion in the natural world can reshuffle our priorities. A sustained commitment to honor the whole of nature can recast the form of our lives. That commitment may grow slowly, sprouting from the rich compost of experience accumulated deep within us. Or it may strike with sudden grace, an epiphany that breaks through the surface of our lives.
The commitment to live in ecological kinship comes when we realize we're participating in a dance that we did not -- and could not -- choreograph. It is a dance older than memory with a cast that comprises all matter.
We turn with the earth's own turning, led by sun and moon, accompanied by an exquisite array of fellow dancers. Oak. Birch. Raven. Human. Lichen.
To join in this dance is indeed enough.
© F. Marina Schauffler
