Fictional, but based on an actual conversation, with the interlocutor here speaking.

I’ve been homeless for ten years. I made some mistakes and I paid for them, but I lost all my friends, and my family refused to ever see me again. Jobs are scarce; I have no skills of value to anyone. But like Siddhartha in the Hesse novel, I can think, I can wait, I can fast. Many days I go hungry. But I have infinite patience. And I can think, but usually think myself into a self-righteous and ethical stalemate.

I decided to give up trying to make it, you know, to give up trying to be a square peg — or is it round? It was just too hard: trying to pay rent or a mortgage, trying to pay insurance and debts, trying to guess what pleases people.

I imagine average people would say that it is my fault, that I am dysfunctional. But wasn’t it Freud who said, “Who wants to be functional in a dysfunctional society?” Not just dysfunctional — modern society is basically sick. All the values are upside down. What is celebrated is greed, exploitation, violence. What is scorned is simplicity, nature, the slow, and the quiet.

Being homeless, I know this firsthand. Homelessness is being criminalized. Simplicity is being criminalized. The Native people of this continent didn’t have property deeds and legal documents, so everything was stolen from them, and when they insisted that this was their home and that everybody had free access to the water, the land, the forest — well, they were pushed out of the way, or were killed outright.

Today it’s average people, the poor people. The simple people. And many just don’t see how they are being abused by society. Homeless people are society’s front line, the soldiers that were put on the front line to die first. The average people, the wage slaves that carry on, they don’t realize what society has done to them. They don’t resent or understand, they just admire those who abuse them. They want to be rich, and they think the next lotto ticket is their pass to that stairway to heaven. John Steinbeck, the writer, called them “embarrassed millionaires.” That’s what they are, still groveling for a chance to sit at the boardroom table.

Of course, homeless people have a bad reputation. It’s true that many are alcoholics, addicts, mentally ill. They smell bad, wear ragged clothes, talk loudly to themselves. They scare me plenty of times when I’m out there. But that’s the difference: I don’t drink, smoke, do drugs. I have no behavior problems, travel with a clean kit, bathe and groom, and get clean thrift shop clothes when I need to. I stay in shelters and missions when I need to eat and rest, but I prefer being outdoors and on the road. I dumpster-dive for most food and sleep under the stars when I can, which is why I tend to stay in climates where there are beaches and woodlands. I don’t like to panhandle because then you immediately lose respect, and self-respect. I have money for small things because I will do odd jobs, though most people are suspicious of me. Many towns have centers where men gather waiting for a job. Once in a while I will get something, enough to keep me going, but I avoid groups. They can be dangerous to a peaceable person like me.

My health has been good. Maybe that’s because I eat very little, walk a lot, get fresh air. If I was religious I could be a wandering preacher. Jesus was a wandering preacher. Doesn’t the Gospel say that birds have their nests and foxes their dens but that he was homeless? Don’t people realize what that means, about God taking care of the flowers and birds? I think Jesus was homeless in every sense: no property, no relations, no friends or kin, no career. And that’s how he figured out everything, how he became wise. There isn’t any other path for a solitary.

You make no demands on life, if only because you aren’t around long enough to see the conclusion. Yet sometimes there is something that bubbles up inside of me, that you want to tell people, even shout to people, something like: “Don’t you know that you can be free? That if you could open up to everyone, you won’t need all this fear, this terror, insecurity. That all this control is a grand charade, a phantasmagoria to fool you into never going your own way, never daring to, never learning what life is all about. Isn’t that what Jesus might have said, and Buddha, and probably everybody else you would call wise?

So, you know, the town to where I am heading next is poor but has water and lots of trees. I’ve been there years ago. But ever day is new. I feel like a deer or a bear or a turtle. Every day I have to find food, get some sleep, wash myself, protect myself. At least I don’t have anyone. It’s an odd blessing, though, or a curse of sorts: sometimes I get very lonely and wonder if it’s all wrong. Successful people don’t think that way, they just assume it’s all just right, just the way it should be, themselves, the world, the universe, it’s just dandy because they do what they want and nobody stops them, so therefore the universe favors the arrogant and the sociopath and the fittest. That’s the thinking of the mind serving the body and calling it success. But I don’t think like that. I think like the deer, and the bear, and the turtle. Life is tough but they are free.

It’s probably better not to think. Everything I know is from my intuition, my wits, my gut feeling. Not from thinking. Better not to think, really, because then what you know comes naturally, you come into knowing that is more natural instead of just assuming things because someone told you or because everybody else thinks that way, or because your life is ordered just so. In that way, my mind becomes very settled, very peaceful. It’s like finishing a journey that went well: you might remember and regret losing the good of it, but you are ready to finish and rest, satisfied weariness. That’s how I want to go, really, when that day catches up.

But no rest yet, no end yet. Say, I’d best be going on. Thanks for listening to me.

A poem of Wendell Berry begins:

Beyond this final house
I’ll make no journeys …

Berry is a farmer (and poet, teacher, essayist) — this sentiment is close to the heart of the farmer, for it affirms the permanence (to the degree that anything has) of land, of soil that returns labor with harvest, that preserves health and bounty, that stretches the spirit into nature itself. (Here land has the “permanence” that the ancient Chinese ascribed to “heaven and earth.”)

Like the farmer, too, a house well-made, overlooking fine land, nourishing to creatures, blessed with clean water, vistas to the surrounding mountains and forest, sky and stars, complements the farmer’s sense of perpetuity and identification with nature and the grand cycles of existence. In this regard one can conjure the images of villages and farms depicted in Lao-tzu (Tao te ching, 80) when he describes the inhabitants of an ideal society in conformity with the Tao:

They truly love their homes,
so they have no interest in travel.
There may be some carts or boats,
but these don’t go anywhere.

Everything is ordered and predictable, and that is what the farmer in Berry would seek in his final house. But as the poem continues, the “house” is more complex.

Beyond this final house
I’ll make no journeys, that is
the nature of this place,
I came here old; the house contains
the shade of its walls,
a fire in winter; I know
from what direction to expect the wind;
still
I move in the descent
of days from what was dreamed
to what remains.
In the stillness of this single place
where I’m resigned to die
I’m not free of journeys:
one eye watches while the other sleeps
– every day is a day’s remove
from what I know.

The house is the container of poet’s mind and spirit. The poet is now old and realizes that this will be his last house, that his journeying will end here, though one ultimate journey remains, and every day brings him closer to it, one step removed from the familiar.

Yet as a farmer, as one close to nature in all its vicissitudes, the poet knows that he can be reconciled to the journeying, having recognized the patterns of nature. In that house which is the temple of his spirit, in that body and mind that gives life yet, will he come to the last journey in peace because he is already reconciled, because he already lives in conformity to that grand cycle that Lao-tzu would have called the Tao. The poet is old, “came here old,” perhaps because it has taken a lifetime to recognize the principles which can now give him peace of mind, that give him a “fire in winter,” and a strength that he had not when younger, and a discernment he lacked but now has, sufficient to “know from what direction to expect the wind.”

Now, Berry may not have been thinking about Lao-tzu in any line of this poem, but he affirms the instinct for conformity to nature as approximating that which defines and gives value to life, that which harmonizes human experience and reconciles the self to the cycles of life. In this is the universality of poetry — that is, when it addresses vital questions from a deep and strong place, not from a fleeting emotion or from a misapprehension of modern whim, but from a place rooted in nature, where observations are bound to have richness and resonance.

***

Houses or dwelling places will capture the aspect of location within nature in writings on the simple life, for dwellings come to reflect or project the mentality of their resident. Compare four different personalities in the little compilation by Bruce Watson titled Four Huts. The four disparate writers are Po Chu-i, Yasutane, Kamo no-Chomei, and Basho. In brief one may say that they represent an esthete, an idler, a pessimist, and a wanderer, each nevertheless enduring, each retaining the strength of articulate writing and the pursuit of solitude. To one degree or another they each understand the dwelling as reflection of self. Thus, Po Chu-i thinks of retiring to his wonderful thatched hall on which he has been working for years, not without an admitted boastfulness and pride at his accomplishment. Is he speaking only of his dwelling, or of his own persona?

Yasutane was still writing in Chinese and under China’s cultural influence. His pond pavilion, as he calls it, his final dwelling, embarrassingly not modest, is the object of much attention over years of dreaming. He repeats the ominous old saying that the builder does not live long enough to live in what he builds. This discourages him, being along in years. This place will have to do, he says. It is, however, a little gaudy and graced with excess, no less than himself; even the attention expended on it cannot but contrast with Yasutane’s own assessment of himself:

I’m like a traveler who’s found an inn along the road, an old silkworm who’s made himself a solitary cocoon. How long will I be able to live here?

Kamo knows better than his Chinese counterparts, reflecting on life and circumstances more forcefully and intelligently than the previous two authors. Kamo has seen Japan suffer great upheavals, natural disasters, and knows the fragility of life and circumstances beyond the vicissitudes of his own personal preferences. The opening lines of his celebrated Hojoki are full of vigor:

The river flows on unceasingly, but the water is never the same water as before. Bubbles that bob on the surface of the still places disappear one moment, to reappear again the next, but they seldom endure for long. And so it is with the people of this world, and of the houses they live in.

Kamo is a genuine hermit in crafting his dwelling to conform to his philosophy and mind, his sense of impermanence — even to noting that in a pinch he can disassemble his hut and transport it with him. Kamo lives (to paraphrase Berry) in the shadow of the walls of his dwelling and knows from where to expect the wind. Yet his simplicity, while not rooted in the soil, is firmly a part of it as part of the earth of “heaven and earth,” presented as an offering to the whims of time and change. This paring of thought and possessions allows Kamo to be a trenchant philosopher as well as a successful hermit.

The disposition of Kamo also suits Basho, who was a traveler and wanderer, yet dearly loved the tiny dwellings in which he resided, however long or short. His very name derives from the banana tree, for a tree he carefully tended against winter winds, not always successfully (but bananas always grow back). When he left his first hut he hoped friends would save the banana tree, thus providing him a continuity with the past.

Basho wrote his poems while traveling, and his self-imposed exile from a happy dwelling must have shadowed his writing. Within his hut or “phantom dwelling,” Basho conceives of a perfection that awaits his ripening within it, deliberately simple a hut and deliberately simple his own mind and heart. But the poet’s transparency is fragile. He wonders if he is cut out for solitude, or is it just that “weary of dealing with people, I’ve come to dislike society.” He wonders if his devotion to poetry is excessive, as it was with Po Chu-i and Tu Fu, whom he cannot match for intelligence or quality of writing. And he scruples about the purity of his practice. But though his hut is his mind and spirit, Basho concludes philosophically, “Do we not, in the end, all live in a phantom dwelling?”