Daniel Suelo - The Man Who Quit Money

 A Review

“Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can’t have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man’s worth couldn’t be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorney or politicians, therefore we couldn’t cheat. 

We were in a really bad way before the white man came, and I don’t know how we managed to get along without the basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.”

-- Lakota sage Lame Deer (from John Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions)

If you’re searching for a modern-day successor to Thoreau, Daniel Suelo could be your postmodern Transcendentalist. Known by author Mark Sundeen as “The Man Who Quit Money,” Suelo has spent the last 12 years living in a cave near Moab, Utah, foraging for food, working occasionally (but not for wages), reflecting deeply on life’s Big Questions, and somehow managing to keep himself off the hamster wheel of getting and spending. Suelo is the rare person who has actually been able to opt out of life’s pecuniary tangle, while still living an existence that appears full and unclouded by the desperation and despair that we tend to associate with homelessness.

He notes, “I’m employed by the universe. Since everywhere I go is the universe, I am always secure. Life has flourished for billions of years like this. I never knew such security before I gave up money. Wealth is what we are dependent upon for security. My wealth never leaves me. Do you think Bill Gates is more secure than I?”

50-year-old Suelo began life as Daniel Shellabarger, the fifth child of a pair of thoughtful evangelical Christians who was raised to take the Bible literally, and yet also, somehow, was permitted to question. A thread of the book traces his theological development, from a child forced to believe, to a deeply inquisitive college student, to someone who reads source texts from world religions, as well as Thoreau, Gandhi, and Tolstoy, and cobbles together a personal theology that reflects his own beliefs. In later years, Suelo even goes back and reviews texts that inspired his parents, such as Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and comes to understand Jesus’ more revolutionary aspects. He also conceives his own theological schema, such as the concept of “divine Chance,” which he develops as a penniless visitor to Alaska, who must test the phrase “God will provide.” He realizes that to experience true faith, he must accept that there’s nothing in the material world to fall back on.

Starting at age 26, Suelo spends several years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador. During that time, some of his religious convictions are tested, as when he visits the mansion of a fellow volunteer who has recruited Ecuadorian natives into helping him run his own cattle business, to the point at which they are “civilized” into being the richest Indians in the jungle. He notes, “There was no poverty in the jungle until they introduced money, and all the sudden there’s poverty. And all the diseases that come with it. And you look at people and they’re not happy. They have all these goods, and they’re unhappy.”

Suelo. Photo: Benjamin Lesage.

While battling his own demons (depression, sexuality), Suelo retains his sense of philosophical inquiry, as he spends more than a decade trying to make the switch to a life without money. Sundeen well-conveys how conscious and reflective Suelo is, as he takes great care to unravel the roots of so much suffering derived of our participation in a monetary system. Ironically Suelo emerges as deeply Christian, in the sense of living out what Christ actually taught: becoming spiritually enlightened through giving to the poor and living humbly. As Suelo asserts, “All this work, work, work and obligation we think is so righteous is really evil, destructive. The more I read the Sermon on the Mount, the more I see it is instructions for releasing ourselves from the Money System—the System of Debt & Obligation.”

Because he lives in a cave and thinks deeply, one might conclude that Suelo is a hermit. But this is actually not the case, as it wasn’t for Thoreau. Despite his comfort with alone time, Suelo is “a social butterfly” and enjoys the companionship of his many friends and family members. In fact, his vow to live without money often draws to him people who are curious about his life and principles. He readily acknowledges that, in a completely interconnected universe, no one is entirely self-sufficient—and his renunciation of money is not about attempting to break those ties.

I edited Sundeen’s work when I was an editor at Outside Magazine years ago. However, I don’t know him personally and have no investment in the book’s success, so can rave about it at will. Obviously, the writing quality is high, but what makes this volume so compelling is the number of questions it raises about the issues we all grapple with: money and greed, family, relationship, compensations of every stripe, trading quality of life for work, the definition of home, etc. Sundeen hews a direct path into Suelo’s mind, and it’s fascinating to watch him take clear-eyed looks at his own life and motivations. At one point, Suelo discusses why he’s not in a relationship, and Sundeen goes straight for it, asking, “How much of your life is just a reaction to not falling in love. Do you think you were driven into solitude by a broken heart?” Suelo’s measured response reveals just how deeply he has considered these questions—and his reflection compels the reader’s own soul-searching as well.

McCandless

Of course many parallels between the journeys of Suelo and Chris McCandless (subject of Into the Wild) exist. McCandless would have definitely agreed with Suelo that “the way of truth is the way of nonpossession,” as he donated his entire $25K savings to Oxfam before embarking on his cross-country adventure. Both young men realized that their experiences could be diminished by having money to fall back on if the going got tough. And both realized that money often prevents us from enjoying our lives in the deepest possible ways.

Unsurprisingly, there is no tradition of living without cash in the US. Most likely because money was so fetishized by our ancestors. Native American writer Vine Deloria (God is Red) notes, “In the centuries after the Protestant Reformation, poverty was considered indicative of sloth and other sins, and it was seen as proof of the individual’s degeneracy…As the white populace of Christian America has become more affluent, the concept of stewardship has been developed to explain the embarrassingly rapid growth of wealth of a substantial number of peoples. The theory goes that we are not really greedy, God has simply blessed us by giving us wealth over which we are to exercise good stewardship.”

This book's release has been particularly well timed, for an era in which we're realizing what "good stewardship" for a few has meant to the many, some of whom find themselves in Suelo's situation involuntarily and are forced to confront the very same questions he has addressed so eloquently. Suelo's philosophical journey should inspire all of us to wonder about the financial system we were born into and the alternatives that might just offer a happier existence to far more than the 1 percent.

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Suelo produces a blog, “Moneyless World – Free World – Priceless World,” at http://zerocurrency.blogspot.com/ and a website with a lot of great answers to FAQs, “Living Without Money,” http://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/. (Nope, no wi-fi in the cave; online life happens at the library.)

More about Chris McCandless: http://www.christophermccandless.info/.

Check it out! This review can also be read at the NY Journal of Books:
http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/man-who-quit-money

The Homeless: Don't Believe Everything You Think

Yesterday, while I was volunteering at our local food bank, I was chatting with one of the other volunteers, whose interest seemed piqued when I told her I worked as a cook for the homeless. Clearly she was involved in the issue of hunger, yet she confessed that she and her friends had some concern that people on the streets were taking advantage of the resources the community extended (aka “freeloading”). This is a very common perception, as is the one that states that homeless people live that way “voluntarily.” As she was sincerely struggling to grasp the reality of the situation, she asked what my perceptions were

The more I work with the homeless, the more I understand that the reasons people lack shelter are extremely varied. Everyone has a story—and many of those stories will break your heart. All of them involve myriad factors. The backstory is never as simple as, “John is a drunk” or “She’s just lazy.” In any one individual you may see a patchwork quilt of issues such as a violent home environment, an alcoholic parent, growing up in poverty, severe mental illness, incest, substance abuse, extreme parental neglect, post-traumatic stress disorder, developmental disabilities, sudden job loss, chronic physical illness, home loss due to a natural disaster, and all the emotional fallout from these stressors.

Some of those we pass on the streets may look perfectly fine, capable of working, even charming and likely to succeed.But if you spend some time with them, you may find that the façade belies someone who utterly cannot sustain the basics required for holding a job. Sometimes I will look at someone who seems to have a lot going for them, sit down and have an intelligent, thoughtful discussion. And an hour or day later, they may appear to be completely gone, somewhere I can’t find them, severely anguished, raving about a phantom or simply somewhere else. Our human skin hides so much of the truths of our lives. You can never look at someone and presume to know how together or capable they are.

Homelessness is very rarely “voluntary.” Who would choose to be cold, hungry, harassed, vulnerable, unsafe, subject to arrest, and often literally spit on by members of our capitalist society? It is difficult for us to comprehend the miserable state these people are dwelling in. And the reality that any one of us could be homeless tomorrow. When that reality becomes too painful to bear, we tend to blame the victim.

I’ve been reading the book Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, about an impoverished Puerto Rican family living in the South Bronx in the 1980s. It is a fascinating account of a culture I previously knew little about, and sometimes recounts events so extreme that I find myself tempted to judge. In a Salon.com interview, LeBlanc addresses why our societal propensity to judge is really not helpful. “…a judgmental place allows [people] not to feel the pain, and the sadness, and the shame we should feel, really--the shame that these young people are not protected the way they should be. …judgment [is] a way to stay separate from someone else.”

In other words, if we walked in these people’s shoes, their lives and choices would make sense. LeBlanc states, “These people have tried every available response to an impossible situation. To survive, they have to be incredibly improvisational, incredibly resourceful. And if you bother to open your eyes in that place, you'll probably know that your ideas of what a person should do are just not applicable.”

This directly applies to the many homeless people I know as well. Having to survive on the streets demands cunning and savvy. These are skills that must be learned, and mistakes come at a very high price, including rape, incarceration, starvation, and often death. Some people here claim that these individuals enjoy “roughing it” or camping out. That always makes me laugh. Think about it: how enjoyable is it to camp on a damp, windy, 20-degree night in January?

Yes, most homefree people have rejected the American consumerist dream. Of course they have. That dream was broken to begin with—and rejected them first. What does it say when we cast out people who never had a fair shot at getting a good education, obtaining a well-paying job, buying a home, and collecting a lot of possessions? That they are wrong? Or that the system just might be extremely ill designed? Our societal ideals have been established with a very small group of people in mind. Those who are physically and mentally well, capable of making a living (or “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps”), smart, privileged, educated, and afflicted by few external stressors. This is a pipe dream, a mold very few can fill—yet many try to twist themselves into a pretzel to achieve it. Instead of condemning the homeless as people not like us, we should realize that we are all fellow dwellers in a broken system. And we need a new one, one that truly embraces the many different situations we find ourselves in as human beings.

[Photo 1 by Kirsten Bole]

I Am a Buddhist Geek - Published Today

An excerpt from my article, which has been published by the wonderful podcast/magazine BuddhistGeeks.com today:

I have taken many lessons from Bernie Glassman’s extensive work with the homeless. Glassman’s street retreats, in which people live outside, beg for money, eat in soup kitchens, and sleep out or in shelter beds, have helped thousands of participants generate wisdom and compassion, the kind that only direct experience can spark. The first precept of Glassman’s Zen Peacemakers Order is “not-knowing, thereby giving up fixed ideas about ourselves and the universe.” Working as a socially engaged Buddhist has made me rethink many of the notions I once held, nested within my desire to help “others.” As I was busily considering them as “others,” I was looking down from a mountain of separation. Certainly I have always felt compassion for the homeless, but that issued forth from a secure position of being housed and “feeling sorry” for their “lesser fortunes.”

But as I practiced the Zen Peacemakers’ tenet, the notion of merely doing service work transformed into recognizing a truth of Buddhism: nondualism. I began to realize that, despite the illusion of separation, the boundary between “subject” and “object” is unreal. Like the Jungian use of figurines in sandplay therapy, perhaps our minds have dualistically projected the separateness of others as a way to explore concepts we could not have experienced within the closed loop of a mind.

Glassman states that not-knowing should be “a state of open presence without separation.” Yet if one has never experienced homelessness and is frightened by both the beggar’s mask and the fear of possibly being in his shoes, it is an act of courage to merge with the person on the street. It takes guts to truly own the times when we have felt homeless, not had a safe place to occupy, felt discomfort in our own skin, and dissolve into pure awareness that in essence we are all there, all the time. Whatever props we use to build security around ourselves, homelessness is our natural state. And the often intimidating manifestations of fear and other emotions that we witness in the homeless are states we have all experienced. Cold, hunger, rejection, being turned out—we’ve all known those conditions, too. And at the end of the day, we all have kindred goals: to be safe, to be loved, to be sheltered, to be fed, to be understood.

To read the entire piece, please see:
http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2011/01/of-nondualism-and-cooking-for-the-homeless/

Sweeter Dreams for the Homeless

Many years ago, my friend Dona requested a Native American dreamcatcher for her newborn’s crib. I thought it a nice idea for a Jersey child, and searched the shops of Madrid, NM, to find one made locally. Previously I’d not paid dreamcatchers much mind, as they are plastered all over New Mexican souvenir shops in every pastel color imaginable--New Age tchotchkes for the tourists.

But not all that long ago, the Ojibwa tribe began creating dreamcatchers not to please the tourists, but for their infants, to seize any nightmares or other harm that might be floating through the air, much as a spider's web intercepts whatever flies into it. The Ojibwa intended for good dreams to pass through the center hole to the sleeping person, while nightmares would remain in the web, where they’d perish in the light of day.

In Atlanta, an artist by the name of Ola Bad has been visiting some places that the homeless sleep and sketching dreamcatchers. He then returns at night and photographs them sleeping beneath his drawings. He ultimately plans to create a show about empathy and homelessness. While I view them as guardians of the night, to him, the dreamcatchers represent empathy and gratitude—being thankful for the food and shelter we have.

“My hopes,” he says, “are to get a show built around a series of these and donate half of what I make to the specific person in the photo."

Wooster Collective ran a nice piece on this:

http://www.woostercollective.com/2010/12/ola_bads_dreamcatchers_in_atlanta.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/olabad

Feeding the Homeless Self

Yesterday, at an impromptu meeting about our homeless meal, our office manager suggested the importance of ensuring that our clients “gave back” by volunteering. I agreed with her, but I view it in a slightly different context. I believe we need to do anything we can to blur the hard contours between server and served. The times the meal runs best are when we have “clients” and volunteers working side-by-side and a hierarchy is less present. I am not serving you—we are all serving each other.

Many of us working in this field have connected with our own internal sense of homelessness, and at the very least have empathy for the people who walk through our doors due to our own experiences—internal and external—of homelessness. But I’m talking about something deeper. I believe this is discussed in the Buddhist tradition as “no boundary,” a space in which self and not-self merge, almost as the ultimate in empathy—yet empathy still implies a subject and object. And an inherent greater/lesser distinction. E.g., “I feel sorry for you.”

One of the most profound moments at our meal comes when the volunteers and staff sit down with the attendees and eat dinner. When I first arrived in town several years ago, it felt very natural for me to do this and, while I felt the usual trepidation when sitting down in a group of strangers, I never felt fear. I have since been told that many people are afraid to undertake this sort of intimate contact. I’m not sure what they fear, but they would rather express their generosity from afar. To me this seems as frustrating as writing a check to a charity and never getting to meet the people to whom it provides benefit. Sending money into the void has never felt very satisfying to me.

As humans, we spend a lot of time constructing false boundaries. People whose lives on the surface appear different from ours are often construed as scary. This “smoke detector” is mostly likely hardwired into our brains, a survival mechanism that may have outlived its usefulness. Depending on our feelings of internal security, we may have hair-trigger alarms, which get flipped at the slightest provocation. Person has different-colored skin. BRRRRNNNGGGGG!! I cannot imagine begging on a street corner. BRRRRNNNGGGG!!

So, we go off a lot.

But if we can take a minute, breathe, and try to imagine a connection instead of a wall, the brain can absorb some new information.

If we can find it in ourselves to sit down and share a meal with others whose lives are externally different from ours, we come to realize that we all have very similar goals: to be safe, to be loved, to be sheltered, to be fed, to be understood. And to take it a step further, we understand that even those of us who are fortunate enough to have four walls sheltering us are still homeless in an ultimate sense, that the fortifications we see as solid can only protect us from so much. And though the whole carefully engineered, painstakingly constructed bank vault we may have built around us seems pretty solid in the moment, as those who have survived natural disasters can attest, no one is exempt from the truth of life's impermanence.

It is good to understand how to survive without a home. It is good to realize that we already do.

Homeless Meal

It is a damp, frigid evening in Oregon, the kind that generally makes me pray for the warmth and protection of the homeless people I cook for every Tuesday night at Ashland’s Methodist Church. I worry about them on a regular basis, yet sometimes I think I should not, as they are a hardy, resourceful, and seemingly resilient lot. Survivors though they appear, I know their lives are often incredibly difficult, especially in the colder months, when any romanticized notions of  “camping,” or “sleeping under the stars” get quickly subsumed by subfreezing temperatures and constant precipitation.

Last Tuesday seemed a dividing line, as folks walked in heads down, dirty clothes tucked under big worn parkas, greasy-haired, scowling, in no mood. As I tried to catch their eyes--eyes that too often don’t get met—most appeared lost in a world far away. And while this crowd is generally happy, grateful, even animated, that night it seemed that the reality of the long, cold, dark days ahead had settled into their bones.

Oftentimes, the lines between me and them blur. When I’m done serving, I stand on line with my plate and we sit together at big tables in the church hall and eat our meal. Last week I sat with a 6-year-old girl named Lotus, her parents and surrogate family. Homeless kids always slay me. I watched as people urged her to eat her meal, goaded her on, teased her, smiled at her. And I thought to myself, She may be OK. This is a damn sight better than some kids with homes are getting.

Last year, a social worker paid us all a visit as we were eating, and as I was seated at the table, she interviewed me as a homeless person. She was a youngster, really. A kid just out of grad school, mid-20s soaking wet. Before she got to me, I watched her quizzing my tablemates. Asking questions with great diligence, she worked hard to try and get it right. But there was a difference, very real as she perceived it, between herself and us. And, nice as she was, that made her hold her body stiff and away. Play with her hair and wiggle her glasses a lot.

I picked up a hard-boiled egg and began to peel it, bit by bit, sometimes popping it in my mouth and edging the shell with the tip of my tooth. Then pulling it out and flaying more skin, till just the soft white underbelly was exposed. I could see her watching me from the corner of her eye as she spoke with the man to my right, a 60ish fellow with a grey dreadlocked beard and knocked-out teeth who looked like he’d just walked away from Captain Ahab on a whaling boat. He said to her, “I can’t stand the feeling of being in an enclosed building. I’ve tried it, and I can’t do it. The only time I feel at home is when I’m sleeping outside. So does that make me homeless—or suitably housed?” He broke into gales of laughter. She tried to laugh along in a forced, choked, scared sort of way that sounded like she was attempting to be both politely amused and genuinely amused but not really laughing at him but then again not exactly getting what he meant. I guess, when designing her survey, she hadn’t bargained for a street-smart Plato.

She then turned to me and pushed a questionnaire about quality of life for the Ashland homeless population in my general direction. Then she began quizzing me about my life. I glanced down at my old T-shirt and faded jeans with the hole in the knee, and realized I looked the part. I had become one of the faces of homelessness in her study. A specimen. Someone whose life she seemed both frightened of and trying to improve.

I picked up the egg again and continued to work it. Because I wanted to seem a little more threatening than I was. I wanted her to know that I was, perhaps, a little bit crazy, and that’s what had landed me on the streets to begin with. That I wasn’t particularly concerned with food-handling manners...and might just smash this hard-soft object into her cranium should she provoke me by asking the wrong question.

I was rather hard-boiled in my soft-boiled plot. But the way she was fidgeting as she spoke with me, I knew I’d made my point.

“How often have you been homeless in the last 18 months?” “Do you generally make use of the local shelters, when available?” “Do you receive public assistance or food stamps?” As her questions mounted, I felt myself begin to feel more and more identified with my toughness and resiliency as a homeless person...and see her increasingly as a tan windbreaker-clad nelly who was merely dabbling in the field of social work to introduce vicarious thrills into her tedious life. Maybe to have something to go home and talk about with her banker fiancé, Herbert. When I asked her a question about one of the items on her survey, the tone in her perhaps-25-year-old voice became almost singsong, like a 4th-grade teacher enlightening a student. Somewhere in the space between us hung a pile of judgment—if I was homeless, I must somehow be stupid. If she wasn’t, she must know more.

Condescension. She wasn’t trying to be condescending, but there it was. Inherent in the difference between she and me in that moment. Draped into the folds of her skirt, into the rope of her pearls, into the band of her Seiko.

I had just about stripped the egg bare and considered mashing it between my fingers and smearing it on the wall, on the table, across the front of my T-shirt, branding me as rotten. Instead, when she turned her back, I shoved it whole in the pocket of her windbreaker.

Suddenly feeling like I had a little tiny bit of power, I strode confidently to the front of the hall--and asked for a second helping.