July 17, 2012 |
For more than 11 years I’ve lived without money, government assistance,
or conscious barter. I live primarily in a cave in a Utah canyon, when
I’m not wandering. Occasionally I house-sit, though I never ask for
house-sits; they just come to me. My food comes from what I find in
dumpsters, wild edibles, and what people freely offer. My clothes are
cast-offs.
My decision to live without money was conceived on a backpacking trip
to Alaska in 1998. I camped on the Kenai Peninsula, surrounded by pine
forests, fluorescent fireweed meadows, soaring bald eagles, spawning
salmon, and moose and bears bearing babies. Every living thing displayed
its glory that Alaskan summer. The symphonic harmony astounded me.
I honed in on the berry section of the orchestra. I noticed the berries
along footpaths were more plentiful than elsewhere. Over a couple of
weeks, I gorged on raspberries, noticing the ones near my tent becoming
redder, plumper, and sweeter than the others. Natural selection, I
figured. I’d always thought the idea of talking to plants and trees a
bit hokey, but I couldn’t help but sense my raspberry neighbors speaking
to me. They spoke through a language of color, size, smell, and
sweetness: “Stay, eat!” Ripe raspberries, unlike greener ones, offered
themselves, clusters easily pulling off branches as a woolen cap is
pulled off the head when one comes inside from the cold. It was strange
to feel intimacy from bushes, of all things. It was like Holy Communion:
“This is my body. Take, eat.”
The raspberry bush expected nothing in return and I took from it
without a sense of debt. Yet the bush and I mutually benefited in a
perfect, pay-it-forward economy. Instinctually, I’d walk a good distance
from my camp and poop. I realized pooping was a holy act, simply
because it was ego-less, without a self-righteous sense of generosity.
The bush paid it forward to me, I paid it forward to somebody else. My
turds, revolting to me, were sweet manna from heaven to tiny populations
in the soil. Not only that, but my manna included the bonus of seeds,
propagating raspberry posterity.
There in the woods I felt a therapeutic relief absent in commercial
civilization. I reaped what somebody else had sown, sowed what somebody
else would reap. This was not the tedium of the sow-and-reap trade
economy of commercial civilization – not barter, money, or conventional
agriculture. In wild nature I witnessed no consciousness of credit and
debt, no value judgments, no imbalance. I could see no difference
between work and play.
Thus began a hypothesis of why wild nature’s economy is balanced while
the commercial economy is not and can never be. I saw that nature is a
constant free current – a true currency, that is. Money and possession
represent our control, our interruption, of nature’s current, both in
our minds and in our environment. Thus money is not a functional
currency. Our belief in money represents our lack of trust in nature’s
ability to balance positive with negative, credit with
debt. Possession means control, and goes against the current. Free means
without possession. Free market is an oxymoron.
I saw then that commercial civilization can never succeed in coming
into balance with the environment. The more we try to create balance,
the more imbalance we create. A martial artist, tightrope-walker, or
dancer understands this principle. The more self-conscious you are, left
foot conscious of right foot, the more you stumble. Only by freely
giving and receiving – without self-credit (praise) or self-debt (guilt)
– can balance come. This means giving up consciousness of credit and
debt, not worrying who gets what credit, who owes what to whom. It means
no more delusion of possession, property, and control. To be natural is
to be graceful – to be in a state of grace, a word that comes from the
same Latin root as
gratis, or free.
After this Alaskan glimmer of wild nature, it would take me two more
years to gain the courage to renounce money and conscious barter, to put
my hypothesis to the test. I still find consciousness of credit and
debt infecting my mind. But the longer I test my hypothesis, the less it
is an experiment, the more it is a natural practice of true life, wild
life.
Daniel Suelo’s unconventional lifestyle is the subject of the new book, The Man Who Quit Money, by Mark Sundeen.
