A group of students at Mundelein High School have decided to experiment with months of voluntary simplicity. What exactly is voluntary simplicity you say? In the tradition of Mr. Thoreau, some people choose to withdraw from certain elements/habits of their modern society. And they wouldn’t say their withdrawal is giving up something, but instead it helps them get something back. What do they get back? The possibilities are multitudinous. They might get back time, peace of mind, a deeper sense of self, a better understanding of the world, empowerment, thoughts to explore, perspectives to write about, etc., etc.

The plan for this class is to voluntarily withdraw from something different each month. What would it be like to live without television? Sugar? Cars? Cell phones? The internet? Computers? The possibilities are endless. Each participant will also individualize each month with some of their own simplifications, withdrawals, and experiments.

~ Experiments in Voluntary Simplicity

In the prevailing conditions of daily life, individuals who are not prepared to enter into communication at any moment with their fellow men rate as difficult, antisocial and unfriendly, and are subject to social censure.

But this situation undergoes a volte-face whenever someone can present a socially sanctioned individual project as the reason for his self-isolation and renunciation of any form of communication. We all understand that when somebody has to carry out a project, he is under immense time pressure that leaves him no time whatsoever for anything else. It is commonly accepted that writing a book, preparing an exhibition or striving to make a scientific discovery are pastimes that permit the individual to avoid social contact, to discommunicate, if not to excommunicate himself – yet without automatically being judged to be a bad person.[…] What is nonetheless still expected of him is that, at least by the final moment of his life, he has some form of finished product to show for – namely, a work – that will retrospectively offer social justification for the life he has spent in isolation.

~ Boris Groys (via)

From July, 2007 to January, 2008, and April to June, 2008, James Benning constructed replicas of two cabins that have played pivotal roles in American history. The first is an exact reproduction of the cabin Henry David Thoreau built at Walden Pond in Concord, MA, in 1845.[…]

The second structure is a reproduction of Ted Kaczynski’s cabin he built in the Lincoln, Montana woods and where he was eventually arrested, after a lengthy and expensive FBI investigation, for his part in a deadly bombing campaign. Similarly to Thoreau, he had moved to the rugged, remote cabin in 1971 to learn self-sufficiency and survival skills after becoming disillusioned with mainstream society.

@ Cabin Project (via Shedworking)

As I was sitting this morning, it struck me that meditation is about as far from being an abstract pursuit as is possible. There is a popular idea of meditators as having their head in their clouds, and of meditation as an unworldly pursuit. But it seems to me that there is nothing more worldly than meditation. Not only this, but it also seems to me that a lot of what is sometimes called (although I dislike the term) “worldly” activity is, on the contrary, somewhat abstract and unworldly.

@ thinkBuddha

In all possible hermit dwellings, it is simplicity — a creative simplicity actively reducing the conventions of the world to their essential solitude — that reigns in design, style, space, and functionality. The effort at making a dwelling is more conscious and deliberate than that of any commercial and worldly designer or architect motivated by wealth, pretension, security fears, or status. So many sources on small living or simple living nowadays disappoints the solitary because they concretizes — literally — the very soul of the aspirant for solitude, silence, simplicity, and naturalness with their monstrous boxes for a mindless mass intent on living for what is external to themselves. But, fortunately, many other sources today value the appropriateness of simple living and small dwellings.

@ Hermitary

Complete silence, a ban on bathing and a love of solitude are all part of the job description for a unique position that has become available at Tatton Park – after remaining vacant for the last 150 years.

Head gardener Sam Youd is appealing for an individual showing promise as a modern-day hermit to take residence in his Hermit’s Grotto garden, which will be on display at the RHS Show Tatton Park this month.[…]

The successful candidate must take a vow of silence and be able to live alongside a skull, to encourage human reflection.

@ Liverpool Daily Post (via Hermitary)

Ah, if only this were closer to home — it would be such wonderful research for the novel I’m working on.

One Square Inch of Silence is the quietest place in the United States. Located in the Hoh Rain Forest at Olympic National Park, it is 3.2 miles from the Visitor’s Center above Mt. Tom Creek Meadows on the Hoh River Trail. Hiking time from the parking lot at the Visitor’s Center to the site is approximately two hours along a gentle path lined by ancient trees and ferns. The exact location is marked by a small red-colored stone placed on top of a moss-covered log at 47° 51.959N, 123° 52.221W, 678 feet above sea level.

(via Hermitary)

Today I had a simple enough job. Put in a new post for a gate – known here as a ’strainer’ because it takes the strain of either the weight of the gate or the tensioned fence in the other direction, or both. The post itself is like a 7ft section of telegraph pole and it weighs about twice as much as I can lift. And we live on a very slopy croft. So I devise a sort of strap arrangement which allows me to drag it with one end on the floor. I traverse the steep part of the slope above the chickens with no possibility of stopping. Like some all-or-nothing ice climb. If I let the damned thing go it will roll down the hill and be a 30mph sledgehammer long before it has got to the chicken house. Chickens are so trusting. They cheered me on from the other side of the electric fence, unaware of their mortality.

@ Tales from Green Willow Croft

Writing, publishing, and crofting in northwest Scotland — what’s not to like?

After reading — and immensely enjoying — Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto, I’m left confused and annoyed about the book’s classification as “humor.” Sure, it’s funny, but not like the joke books and sitcom tie-ins I found it shelved with in the store. It’s funny because it points out as absurd the stupid assumptions we take for granted as inescapable, inevitable “facts” of our lives; it’s funny because it’s radical in a lighthearted way. The cynic in me thinks the strange categorization must be a conspiracy by Big Publishing and Big Work to defang the book, lest we all stop going to work and stay home reading and idling instead.

If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in the class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time… But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant… Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if this be not education, what is?

~ Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers