VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY: The Poetic Alternative to Consumer Culture (24 min) from NO WAY Productions on Vimeo.
Samuel Alexander, the Walden fan who we wrote about in an earlier post has been in touch with a copy of his essay, titled: “Deconstructing the Shed: Where I Live and What I Live For”. In December it will be published in the journal Concord Saunterer (dedicated to the works of Henry Thoreau).
Samuel has given us permission to include the essay in the next newsletter, in a few days. Here is a summary of the essay so you know what to expect. If you are not already registered, why not do so now?
In his reflective, philosophical essay, Samuel Alexander describes his living experiment in the urban jungle of Melbourne, Australia. Two years ago, inspired by the life and ideas of Henry Thoreau, Alexander built himself a small shed (mostly out of abandoned or second-hand materials) in the backyard of a property some friends were renting, where he explores the simple life in an urban context. He grows his own organic veges, keeps chickens, spends almost nothing on clothes, doesn’t own a car, uses little energy, etc, and in the 12 months in which he kept an exact acount of his expenditure, his total costs were AU$6792. The essay describes in detail his practice of voluntary simplicity, infusing the discussion with striking passages from Thoreau’s Walden. 