San Francisco Asian Art Museum Public Talk on ADKL!

If you are in Northern California, please come out to a big headline lecture I'll be giving on January 13, a Sunday, from 2-4 PM, at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum.  200 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA 94102

I'll be serving the rare and rustic Awa Bancha, made by Nakamura (Chapter 2) himself (he gave me some on my recent trip).  I'll also be joined by the magnificent Shakuhachi player Cornelius Shinzen Boots who will play a few tunes of Koku Nishimura, the teacher of Murata (chapter 4).  I will show many beautiful slides that we didn't have room to put in the book as well.  I hope you can make it, and share this blog post with people in your networks. 

Here's the announcement: 

Join Andy Couturier and musician Cornelius Shinzen Boots (深禅) for an afternoon of conversation, rustic Awa Bancha tea, mellifluous shakuhachi, and a  a book signing for A Different Kind of Luxury: Japanese Lessons in Simple Living and Inner Abundance. Based on Andy's popular articles in The Japan Times, this lushly designed and warmly written volume is a treasure chest of stories about real people who have created an abundance of time for contemplation, connecting with nature, artistic practice, and contributing to their communities.

Painting by Wakako Oe, Chapter 7

Andy Couturier is a Pushcart Prize–nominated writer and the author of Writing Open the Mind. He has contributed to Adbusters, MIT Press, The Oakland Tribune, The Japan Times, Kyoto Journal, Creative Nonfiction, and The North American Review. Couturier lived for four years in Japan, where he taught, worked as a journalist, and participated in environmental causes. He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and runs The Opening (http://theopening.org), a center for courses in writing.

Koichi Yamashita, Philosopher, Chapter 9

Painting by Akira Ito, Chapter 6

crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world

These are the first two paragraphs of an essay by Rebecca Solnit in Orion Magazine.

Doesn't she say it well?


THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF MY APOCALYPSE are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out. These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our lives and expand our horizons.

I’m listening to a man on the radio describe how great it is that there are websites where musicians who have never met or conversed or had any contact at all can lay down tracks together to make songs. While the experiment sounds interesting, the assumption sounds scary—that the complex personal, creative, and cultural collaborations of music-making could be unnecessary and you just need the digital conjunction of some skill sets. The speaker seems to believe that the sole goal is the production of songs, sundered from the production of social ties and social pleasure. But music has always been an occasion for people to get together—in rehearsals, nightclubs, parties, festivals, park band-shells, parades, and other social spaces. It is often the soundtrack to bodies in conjunction, whether marching or making love.

Put your body in the situation, and wait for your consciousness to follow

I got an email this week that said, in part:

I would like to read a book that maps out how to forget about pizza delivery, commercials,  convienence, and embrace a different frame of mind. I don't want to see a Youtube of a small house with a woman performing as a Zen master cooking one pot meals. I need a book that clearly defines the core values and practice necessary to live a sustainable life and not feel deprived. I don't mean another homesteading book about building mud houses, raising chickens or growing a garden. I mean an exercise book for the mind to learn how to create an artform of living a sustainable life. To learn how to see the completeness of daily living, even if our lives have always felt like so much unfinishedness.

I really appreciate such emails, and it is the core question of the book, perhaps.  I believe that many of these values are woven in to the fabric of A Different Kind of Luxury, and I want to suggest to people to just read the book, to read it slowly, and let the messages percolate into you.  Taking time to read the book is actually taking part in the process.  I didn't want the book to be a how to book.

  Part of the answer however I touched on in directly in the book, when I wrote:

Rhythms of a Himalayan
Village by Hugh Downs

Nakamura now goes into another room and brings out a book, Rhythms of a Himalayan Village. [by author Hugh Downs] “This book was written about the village where I lived,” he says, pointing to a black-and-white photograph of a misty, barren mountainside with several mud-and-tile houses scattered along the ridgeline and distant snowy peaks towering in back. “This is the monastery where I studied wood-block carving, and,” he turns the page, “this man is my teacher, Tapkhay Gendun.” He points to a photo of a monk sitting by a window, his face lined by years of cold-weather living and meager conditions. 

Paging through the book, I lose myself in its beautiful photographs juxtaposed with quotes from the Sherpa villagers and passages from Tibetan Buddhist scriptures. As I read, I begin to sense how the villagers’ way of living, in its utter simplicity, could give Nakamura a physical, bodily understanding of how to live a life of reduced desires and reduced consumption when he returned to Japan.

“It was because I saw the Sherpa’s way of living, and had lived it myself,” says Nakamura, “that when I came to this valley here in Japan and first saw this house, I knew I could live in the same way right here.” 

And this hits on another question I received, when giving a lecture on the book to a group of Japanese women in an English class, and one asked: "But do you have to travel to some foreign country to learn to live like that?"

To which I answered, "No, of course not."

But, that's not totally correct.  I DO think you have to try out living on less, a lot  less, to "get used to it" even if it's uncomfortable at first. That can be accomplished by travel.   My partner Cynthia said once "Being comfortable is an utter religion in the USA, and no one can break that strict religious doctrine by suggesting that comfort isn't the ultimate value."  

My friend Steev, however, spent 3 years living in the forest behind a university campus, and snuck into the woods late at night, living under a tarp in the rain or the cold, and now he can live within any means at all.  He experienced it with his body. Or to say it another way, he put his body in the situation, and waited for his consciousness to follow.

Part of me wants to suggest to the emailer that she begin to make up her own book of exercises for the mind.  My partner Cynthia said, "She's already on the way to writing this book herself!" (Perhaps people want to write to me and give their suggestions, and I can put them up on the blog?  andy [at] theopening [dot] org ).  

Some obvious ideas to try, if you ask me personally: stop watching all TV.  Give up on spectator sports at least.  Read and write more.  Do physical work with your body, making real things, things that can be used.  Spend more time outside. Move to a smaller apartment.  Look at your budget and cut things out.  Stop spending time doing things that don't feed you. If you just don't order pizza delivery for 6 months, eventually you will forget about it. 

But now I am getting a little bit "how to", which I said I wouldn't in the book.  I think it's really about each person making up their own regimen of things to change about their lives.  Changing is hard.  It can be done.  It feels good.

Eric Storm and Beth Meredith:
Coaches in the Good Life

If you want to learn about that kind of change, here's another suggestion: visit my new colleagues' website: Create The Good Life.  Because Eric and Beth are doing exactly that: helping people design a better life for themselves by slowing down, considering their choices more deeply, understanding their own personalities, and learning how to help others.  As they say: 

Imagine ... A good life-work balance. Feeling connected to people & place. Time for what really matters. Greater peace of mind. Helping others live well, too.

But I also want to say to the emailer that those videos of women making one pot meals ARE a help, a pointer in the right direction, and those books about raising chickens and growing a garden are part of the solution too, but you have to try some of these things, and even if they aren't more convenient, or well advertised: they might help you along the way.  

Nakamura brought up this very thing when I saw him last month.  He said: 

"What the people in the Sherpa village were experiencing was not something you could see visually, easily, with your eyes.  It was something about the interior life, very much so.  Of course, if you go to these villages and look, you can see what things they have, or how very little they have. 

"I could see that they were living a life centered around firewood.  I also observed, wondering—you know how cold it is, and all the other difficulties—I wondered, what is the enjoyment in living this way?  What is the flavor, the taste of this way of life, that they enjoy? 

"Growing up in Japan, or living here as a young adult, I might have had many situations to understand what I came to understand while traveling, but I did not come to that understanding.  Maybe I could not have.  It was only while in another country that those kinds of situations had the power to really impact me."

I asked Nakamura, "How did you eventually perceive it?"

He replied, "It was not until I came back here to Japan, and found this place, and started living this way that I thought, 'Ahh, that’s what this enjoyment is.  This is the flavor, the richness.'  You have to live it yourself to understand."

And then he said to me something wonderful, "To have more time than things to do in that time, that is to say to have plenty of time: it is a very rich kind of feeling."

The silence was palpable

Here's a journal entry from my trip to Japan in October.  It's not directly about the book, but anti-nuclear work is very central to many of the people's lives there.  If you want to help, consider attending a protest at the Japanese Consulate.  Here's one in San Francisco.

The silence was palpable: the kind of silence where there doesn’t seem to be any more to say.  The topic is Fukushima.

At a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, after lunch, the man at the table with the spectacles has been explaining to the group how even though many organizations and communities have agreed to accept refugees, very few individuals have volunteered to leave Fukushima. He used his hands to indicate how information was coming in from all directions, fingertips darting here and there in front of his face.  “And no one knows what to believe.  I myself have become confused.” We all waited for him to continue. 

“How much was released?  What level is safe?  But one thing is known: it is the children more than anyone who will sustain the most damage.  The adults, the teachers, the government, the electric company officials: all of them have been saying to the children that it is completely safe, even in Fukushima itself, and, you know children, they believe what they’re told.”

The sadness in my heart is hard and it hurts. What to do? What to do?

This temple, this very temple here in Kyoto is the place where, 3 years ago, I had the incredible transcendent experience—a spontaneous feeling of “enlightenment” or something like that. It lasted, perhaps, only 15 minutes or so.

Thus I have come back to this temple, and, it turns out, today is the 11th. And every month on the eleventh, this congregation gathers to offer the chanting of sutras for those who died on March 11, 2011, and for those who live on.

The Japanese government permitted the restarting of two reactors a few months ago, just upwind from Kyoto, less than a hundred miles away.  China was also mentioned by someone at the table.  They’re building reactors hand over fist.  Some vague reference was made to the government in China: you know how they are about protests and the sharing of information.  The entire vast country to the west of this place: the prevailing winds sweep right round the globe from exactly that direction…

Knowing: the knowing that was supposed to help us all.  To get information and to learn: it does exactly no good.

The man with the glasses, right near the end of the gathering said, “Each one of us has to study, to learn more, has to get more intelligent.”  Then, looking round the table, he said, “None of us here today, has that energy to produce children.”  (I am certainly the youngest person here with my 48 years.) “But those who can, they have to think it over, think hard, and seriously, whether they should.”

And that, that is when the silence began.