hard to be poor

Just heard from my cousin Sam, who landed last week in Costa Rica.  He's the artist-in-residence this month at a young community called Choza del Mundo, in the high-altidude jungle-forest not too far outside the country's capital.  In his response to his new surroundings -- fresh food, simple and functional architecture, courteous and friendly human interactions -- he seems to be having an experience similar to mine in Mexico:  just a day or two outside the overdone, hyperstressed artifice of this country, and you wake up to how much the rest of the world makes sense.  Community and culture and even commerce on a human scale are surprising to a degree that's lamentable, for their being so natural. 

Sam writes that while many people back home would call the circumstances that he's seeing "poverty", he recognizes, right away, that "it's really sustainability... and they realize that here."  Choices are practical, efficient and within the range of needs rather than wants.  And, since most people even in the cities are able to grow their own food, "it is hard to be poor".

What a fine phrase, that.  Hard to be poor.  While plenty of us are aware of poverty's existence and its concomitant suffering -- elsewhere and even in this country -- it has another face that far too few of us consider.  As a matter entirely apart from the deep need for social and economic justice worldwide, poverty does have its chosen form.  And living with less by intention is itself another country, as foreign to this dying-of-consumption society as would be a land beyond an artificially calculated political border.  But many of us who have made even initial explorations into that way of being find it difficult to go back to former pursuits of citizenship among the "wealthy".  And, though we still may struggle, it becomes hard to count ourselves among the poor when our eyes are opened to the wealth of possibilities that a conscious, creative and careful path presents.

I've tried several times before to write about poverty's other, chosen face; it often defies words.  Or perhaps it defies us, as at-all-awakened humans, to invent and refine better words for it. Some have begun to use "simplicity" in this sense, which works at times and at others is misleading (or at least, relative).  "Sustainability" certainly conveys its essence, though it may have lost some of its potency to its buzzword status.  "Precarity" is one of the best terms that I know, partly because the word itself is unfamiliar.  Appropriately opening windows onto a mostly-unrecognized way to see, and be.

In fact, just the effort to find an online dictionary or other source that even recognizes the word convince me that it merits a post all its own.  Another day.  I'm going to leave this thought-thread dangling once again.  And for the moment, let go the greater human concerns, and just offer a couple of my own reasons why -- living now in a small, very contained, landless room/space -- it's pretty hard for me to be poor.