Life in the 12 x 12, or The Upside of the Downsize

My apartment has granite countertops and cushy carpets. There’s a flat screen TV in the living room, and my two roommates also have TVs in their bedrooms. We have a fridge and a microwave, a washer and dryer. Paintings and posters line the walls, and we recently hung some art deco mirrors from Target. We’ve got two couches and two chairs and a dinner table for four. Vases and scented candles and a martini mix set speckle the coffee table. When it’s cold we turn on the heat and when it’s hot we crank the air conditioning.

Inside Dr. Jackie Benton’s home is a rocking chair, four-burner gas stove, a bed and a bookshelf. The photographs of her life are tacked to the cedar walls, along with Buddhist and Taoist sayings written on scraps of paper. That’s it.

My apartment’s 1235 square feet dwarfs her 144 square feet. Beyond Jackie’s 12 x 12 grow Virginia bluebells, persimmon for wine and preserves, cornelian cherry, mint everywhere, spicebush, elderberries, pecan trees and much more flora. Her dozens of gardens lead out to a lush forest and No Name Creek—literally, that’s its name.

It is here in rural North Carolina that a well educated physician in her sixties lives off the grid without plumbing or electricity—in North Carolina, any structure 12 x 12 feet isn’t considered a house and doesn’t require property taxes. The dirt road leading up to the farm isn’t on Google Maps. In the 12 x 12 she has “the carbon footprint of a Bangladeshi” and thrives off her permaculture farm, one that works in harmony with nature. In short, she makes Thoreau look about as materialistic as Kim Kardashian.

All this sounds wonderful to me, as I sink deeper into my recliner and shovel a handful of Oreo’s in my mouth. I gaze up from the book Twelve By Twelve, taking stock of all my stuff. I don’t really need most of it, if any of it. But I like my recliner, I like Oreo’s—if only because I’m used to them. Could I shed it all like Jackie?

William Powers went to find this out for himself. After spending a decade as a relief worker in Africa and South America, he returned to the US astonished by the consumption and total division from nature, and at many times the derision toward it. Jackie invited him to stay at her 12 x 12 while she marched in protests across the country (she took the Greyhound— “Grey-doggin’ it” as she called it —and stayed with friends to reduce her footprint).

And even though Powers had been accustomed to simplicity from his relief work, at first it wasn’t all rainbows and rapture. The first day he couldn’t stomach the idea of the composting toilet, though he didn’t mind the lack of electricity:

The only oddity was that I was in the heart of the world’s richest nation—but living a subsistence life. No humming refrigerator, no ringing phones, and none of the ubiquitous “stand-by” lights on appliances—those false promises of life inside the machines. Instead: the whippoorwill’s nocturnal call, branches scraping quiet rhythms in the breeze, and groggy No Name Creek. Looking east from the 12 x 12 toward the creek into the ink black night, without the slightest glimmer of industrial society, I thought, could I really be inside the borders of a high-tech superpower?

My air conditioner just kicked on. My Pandora music station sings, and I’m swathed in the laptop’s fluorescence. I take mental inventory of the computers, video game consoles, iPods and various iParaphernalia that fill the apartment. With entertainment streaming in our pores at the speed of light, surely we’d get bored at the 12 x 12. What would we do all day alone in the woods, without even Facebook to update, to show off to all our friends how rustic we are on our little nature retreat?

When Powers asked Jackie what he was supposed to do during his weeks there, his direction was “Not do, be…I was simply to sit…being was indeed the most difficult part in an era where clutter—in both stuff and activity—eclipses the sweetness of solitude, the aliveness of the present moment.”

And while reading Powers’ journey in Twelve By Twelve I too became steeped in the present moment. But the book does much more than try to get us to shut off the iPhone and stare at the daffodils. Twelve By Twelve smartly weaves nature writing with literary journalism, philosophy and indigenous wisdom. In a single chapter Powers juxtaposes statistics on carbon parts per million with Mary Oliver’s poem “Mindfulness”; another chapter threads the local history of the KKK with the dialogue of a Bolivian medicine man. This is how both the book and a permaculture farm work: part science, part spirituality, part sheer poetry.

Powers unpeels a world much larger, and much richer, than the American monoculture of strip malls and fast food joints. Twelve By Twelve takes us to Bolivia’s remote Aynmaran village, a New Mexican organic garlic farm, Brazilian rainforests and the Gold Kist chicken factory, yet always we come home to the 12 x 12. Of course, the 12 x 12 is not my home. My home is on the second floor of a neatly landscaped stucco complex, pretentiously called The Madison at SoHo.

Though I’ve highlighted and dog-eared nearly every page, I can’t just up and move to a cabin in the woods. Powers knows this, and his final chapters push beyond the walls of the 12 x 12 into practical ways I can let the sap of his experience run into my own life. And even with an appendix of resources for organic farms and nonprofit organizations, Powers still swirls his tender personal narrative with lessons from Thich Nhah Hanh and Nietzsche.

I close the book and look out my window to the cars rushing below, feeling all sorts of wasteful. But there’s inspiration mixed in there, too. Perhaps because there is my world of metal and glass, and another world of water and persimmons. But these worlds are not entirely separate, and perhaps it is their intermingling that is the most beautiful possibility.

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Melissa Carroll wrote this wonderful essay about space and what we cling too. (I shall not depart with my Iphone, ever.) She teaches yoga and writes phenomenal blog entries at: zenontherocks.blogspot.com/.