For the Sake of Simplicity

Watermelons & Stargazing

This time of year, watermelons are still arriving in the local markets from Mexico. I reflect on cutting up a watermelon as a simple thing, bringing down the knife with determination and control, slicing into the pink, sweet, juicy flesh with an aroma impossible to duplicate. But it takes time to cut up a watermelon, “like to have a friend takes time,” to quote Georgia O’Keefe. But the hurried life dictates that I should conveniently pick some already cut up in the local grocery store deli. There is more than a financial cost for this convenience. There is a loss of connection to the thump of ripeness, the rind’s shades of green-striped color, and the earth herself. And what is that sensual pleasure worth?

I once worked in a deli where I walked past the beautiful Mexican man who sliced up watermelons and pineapples, and it made me smile. I imagine a simpler life in his country and think about the law of reciprocity. To purchase his watermelon, I am required to trade time for money. In the end, what do we gain? I am finding my way back, I suppose, as I find my way forward, to a greater need for simplicity. It is a paradox.

The term “Voluntary simplicity” emerged in 1936 when Richard Gregg wrote that it means singleness of purpose, sincerity, and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter or possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life. Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin, first published in 1981, is a sacred text for those wanting to liberate themselves from enslavement to a job. There is a considerable price to pay for our mass consumption lifestyle in terms of environmental degradation. Voluntary simplicity is a lifestyle choice that minimizes the needless consumption of material goods and the pursuit of wealth for its own sake. Living a simple life has been modeled by those who came before us. It is not about living in poverty but living a meaningful and harmonious life.

So, I moved to a small town near the Mexican border, where life moves slower. People have time for each other. I don’t have a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a clothes dryer, or an HVAC system in my nearly 100-year-old home. Usually, we think of these time-saving devices and creature comforts as simplifying our lives. I found the opposite to be true. Hanging my clothes on the line saves on the electric bill, which again requires trading time for money, and it also connects me to the people who came before me. There is a nostalgia for going back to a simpler time.

It also takes time to go out under a night sky and look at stars unless you live in a big city that never sleeps, but even then, you won’t see those kinds of stars. I know because I used to live in downtown San Francisco. But now I live in New Mexico, where the ring of fire was visible earlier this week during the annular solar eclipse. It passed over me in Silver City and Sandia Peak in Albuquerque, often called Watermelon Mountain. Sandia means watermelon in Spanish.

I sat in the sun’s energy and simply received its transmission. I did not wear glasses, though I stole a peek or two near totality. I listened as the birds grew quiet, the light eerie, and the air cooler. I surrendered the past to its own direction. I imagined an earlier and simpler time when everyone living in the eclipse’s path noticed the sun’s dying. But from where I sat on my front porch, I watched as cars drove by and neighbor’s children played, unaware.

Indigenous cultures have their own beliefs and practices surrounding the solar eclipse. According to Yaqui custom, pregnant women and children do not go outside. Many people experience nausea at totality during a solar eclipse. I did during the total eclipse in 2017. The Navajo call it “the death of the sun.” In song and prayer, they call to the ones who watch over us by sunlight. Our recent eclipse was a south node eclipse and deals with patterns of the past. We stand in the shadow, and when the sun reemerges, it is considered a new beginning, a time of death and rebirth.

Eclipse at Chaco Canyon by Shari Ubechel

The Diné (Navajo) have observed the night sky for countless generations. They developed a sophisticated cosmology and way of seeing, known as Two-Eyed Seeing, with one eye focused on indigenous ways of knowing and the other focused on Western ways of knowing, using both for the highest good. This balanced way of seeing and whole-brain thinking is needed to resolve our current impasse.

Navajo cosmology reflects the emphasis that Navajo people place on the night sky and its connection to the earth. Navajo ways of knowing, including Navajo astronomy, are based on a sense of the power and significance of place and reflect the importance of the relationship between Mother Earth and Father Sky.

In Taos, 2004, I met an exceptional Cherokee-Navajo woman, Nancy Maryboy, who lived and worked in the Navajo Nation. We met at a conference organized by the Frank Waters Foundation (Book of the Hopi), where she presented traditional ways of healing, and I performed a concert of my Native American-inspired healing songs. Maryboy comes from a family of ceremonial and medical healers. She is an indigenous science expert and educator focusing on Indigenous astronomy. Six years after we met, her book Sharing the Skies: Navajo Astronomy, co-written with David Begay, was published in 2010.

I learned more about indigenous medicine from Maryboy and the complex linkages of what David Bohm terms the “implicate order” between mental, physical, social, cosmic, and spiritual realms. An imbalance of hozhoo, or what is known as “harmony” in Traditional Chinese Medicine, is evaluated in terms of its relationship to an earlier, more desirable state of being. A Liver or Wood imbalance in TCM is an imbalance of excess. That can be an excess of anything: thoughts, emotions, food, or material possessions (Learn more at Love Your Liver).

The restoration of balance becomes an initiatory process that gives the patient spiritual authority and increased understanding so that healing may occur. The use of herbal remedies is widespread. Herbs are acquired with extreme care and proper spiritual protocol in a similar manner to traditional Chinese medicine approaches. It doesn’t matter whether you use Western medicine, traditional healing methods, or both. The most important thing is that you are an active participant. Both can initiate healing, but the ultimate restoration of health and harmony has to come from you and your connection to the earth and sky.

One type of Navajo diagnostician is the stargazer, who diagnoses problems through starlight. Just as the Western astronomer speaks of the ancient light from the stars just now reaching the earth, stargazers also speak of stars as the ancestors from which we came. But we have learned to fear the sun and to block ourselves and our senses from it – our eyes and skin. For most of my life, I have lived an outdoor lifestyle in the Sunshine States since childhood: Florida, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. I have rarely worn sunglasses or used sunblocks. At sixty-eight years of age, I am thankfully skin cancer-free. But I also use common sense, take the time to be present with myself, and revere the power of nature.

And so my life has become outwardly simple and inwardly rich as I work in my garden, carve up a watermelon for salad, stargaze, write songs, or visit places like the Gila Cliff Dwellings that remind me of how little we need in this life. It is my prayer that we can learn to live more simply. And, like anything worth getting good at, it takes practice. I pray that it may continue for the sake of the next seven generations.

Gila Cliff Dwelling, photo by Chuck Willhide

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When the Moon is Full

A prayer for the next seven generations. Recorded live in the studio with my granddaughters and Pappy Chuck, aka the GreenMan and previously unreleased. To download the song and read the lyrics please visit Thea on Bandcamp.