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Chaotic Simplicity
Today I met with one of the acting clerks for the local Quaker meeting. It’s only a small meeting at present though they are hoping to increase their membership. They’re building a new meetinghouse and in the interim, are using another church’s premises as a meeting place.
I didn’t hear anything to put me off it. Politically liberal, check; no fixed dogma, check; social and environmentalism, check; accepting of the gay community, check. These are Liberal Quakers, so-called to distinguish them from a more conservative and evangelical branch.
The person who met with me has a living room that is stark in its simplicity---all beige and wood, very minimalist, very Japanese, very beautiful. “Very Quakerly,” he said. But though the house was lovely, extremely so, traditional Quaker color schemes wouldn’t do for me, whether I become a Quaker or not. I live the simplest possible life----I don’t even own a house and don’t expect to---but I like richness and complexity in color schemes.
My favorite painter is Matisse and I try to emulate his canvases in putting together my main color schemes. One wall of my small living room is painted the richest possible yellow, verging toward but never quite reaching orange. I made a set of shelves like the ones I had in college, melamine boards separated by what the local stonemason calls ‘decorative blocks’---but I painted the blocks in layers of paint with intricate designs ‘carved’ into the forward faces. Those shelves are covered mostly with glass in various intense colors, though there are a couple of large tropical birds carved out of wood my mom got me from an antique stores, plus two large jars of giant marbles in various combinations of colors. My furniture is white and my room is small with very little in it but the effect is opulent. When I am depressed, just staring at the way all that glass looks with the light coming through it can cheer me up. I want to be surrounded by pure vibrant colors with no grey, brown, or black mingled in.
I also couldn't do without the additional chaos produced by many pets. I have three cats and a hamster. The hamster has his own room (he more or less has to); the cats occupy all the rest of the house. They matter more to me than anything I actually own. My cats have turned the carpet on the stairs into a scratching pad and they have been scratching it when my back is turned for three straight years. But the cats are cats and are individually irreplaceable; the carpet is just a carpet. They are also ruining a rug that I liked a lot but....ditto.
Simplicity comes in various forms. My life is simple. I own and consume relatively little for an American. I do not spend much money on clothes and am indifferent to fashion. In fact, most of my family regard my indifference to accumulating property as downright irresponsible. In my own community, people are baffled that I don’t want to buy a home but am content so far (and at my age) to live in apartments.
But a person has only so much energy or time. The time that people devote to maintaining a house and yard is energy and time I’d rather expend on something else. I hate doing maintenance, though one pretty much as to, and one of my goals for myself is to minimize the number of drains on my available energy. To me, the appeal of ‘simplicity’ is that it leaves you free from tedious (and stressful) details required for managing. If you have a lot of anything, you expend a certain portion of your life maintaining it, stewarding it, fostering it. It’s fine for people who like that sort of thing, but it doesn’t do for the minority who think ‘freedom’ means something more than freedom to collect consumer goods.
Which brings me back round to the Quakers and their appeal for me. Life has always gone too fast for me. I feel exactly like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass: all roads round here may belong to me, but the ground moves so quickly that you have to run twice as fast as it does to stay in the same place. I need a slow sort of country where people aren’t so walled off from one another. I need a place where people aren’t surprised to see a woman walking.
I’m hoping to find a community of people who at least feel that something matters besides acquiring more and more stuff or getting further and further up some imaginary ladder of personal significance. "I'm not getting anywhere," I said once to my friend Frances. "That's because there's nowhere to get to," she replied. I didn't think it was true then, but I do now.
“Don’t you think most people today have an over-inflated sense of self?” asked a very intelligent, very thoughtful student under my jurisdiction.
I think most people might. Perhaps at one point in my life I too had the feeling that I was some sort of ‘fixed point in the turning world’; I know my parents told me often enough that the universe doesn’t revolve around me. If I felt that way before, many successive losses taught me differently. It was feeling so completely insignificant that perhaps helped drive me toward religion-----if you don’t feel that you matter at all, it can be hard to find a reason for pushing through the usual obstacles of daily life. After my late husband’s death in particular I used to wake up in the night full of the terror of being completely on my own. That feeling in turn drove me to think about the experience of those who are more alienated and more neglected than I felt: the homeless, the very poor, the dying, and the neglected elderly. It took that to make me see.
And it took seeing to turn my thoughts in direction of God and the need for some sense of connection that wouldn’t fail me when everything else did. And it took losing most of the little I had to make me see how little I really need. As Lao Tzu said---this is of course a paraphrase---sometimes you can make great gains by losing.
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“Infinite & Unforeseen.” The Cathars, the Quakers, T.S. Eliot, & Me
Chaotic Simplicity
Quaker Meeting
Matisse and My Mom
7:04:35 PM 
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