Nearing Enough
(Page 2 of 6)
A MEETING OF THE MINDS
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Helen Knothe's (1904-1995) early study of music, Eastern religion and theosophy led her to India in the early 1920s, and then to Australia to live in community on Sydney Harbor. She met Scott in 1930, "and there started my real-life education."
Together, Helen and Scott moved to New York City, where they "were exceedingly poor" and yet were "convinced that life could be good and were determined to make ours so."
In The Good Life Album of Helen and Scott Nearing, a photographic memoir, Helen Nearing wrote, "Born and brought up in the richest nation on earth, with its multitudinous gadgets and gimcracks as part and parcel of our daily lives, we realized that we must be prepared to reject these toys, to strike out for ourselves and to pioneer in the real sense of that term."
And pioneer they did, choosing the United States over becoming expatriates, and choosing New England for its seasons and its Old World lineage. In Vermont, in 1932, they bought a run-down 65-acre farm that was nestled in a lovely wilderness setting. "Conveniences," they wrote, "consisted of a pump and a black iron sink in the kitchen and a shovel-out backhouse at one end of the woodshed."
In Living the Good Life they asserted, "We were seeking an affirmation, a way of conducting ourselves among those values which we considered essential to the good life ... values including: simplicity, freedom from anxiety or tension, an opportunity to be useful and to live harmoniously ... "
They said they "... would have preferred the cooperative or communal alternative, but ... there were none available or functioning into which we could happily and effectively fit." However, they generated community by lecturing and writing and by hosting visitors to their homestead. They also sold at cost or gave away parcels of their land to like-minded people.
From the beginning, the Nearings made the decision to leave the "wage slavery" of a market economy and, instead, to commit to a "use economy." They wrote that "a market economy seeks by ballyhoo to bamboozle consumers into buying things they neither need nor want, thus compelling them to sell their labor power as a means of paying for their purchases."
"Homesteading," Scott Nearing wrote in The Making of A Radical, "is based on the production of goods and services which are consumed directly without the intervention of the market. In our case we raised food and ate it, cut fuel and burned it, constructed buildings and lived in them, thus eliminating the major cash costs of living ...
"Commodity production and high-pressure selling have turned millions of talented humans into spectators who stand outside all the creative processes of nature and society and feel their own creative impulses shrivel and die ... Following the rhythms of nature provides more than a formal education; it stimulates an unfolding and growth and attaches the fortunate individual irrevocably to Mother Earth."
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