The Moneyless Man (17 page)

Suelo on ‘living without money’

To say that I live without money isn’t saying anything, really. That’s like saying I live without belief in Santa Claus. Now, if we lived in a world where everybody believed in Santa Claus, you might think I’m stepping out on a limb to live without Santa Claus.

Suelo, asked ‘Do you think money is evil?’

No. Money is illusion. Illusion is neither good nor evil. Imagine if you had eyes that saw reality rather than your own belief.
Imagine if you saw a $100 bill as a piece of paper with a pretty work of art on it and nothing else ... One time I found a $20 bill and decided to play with it in this way. I cut it up and made a collage out of it.

The $20 bill incident brought down a lot of negative comment. There was great debate about whether it would have been better to give it to someone who needed it or better to stop assigning it an illusory value and to take it out of circulation. But, by giving it away, would he have been guilty of reinforcing a system that gave rise to the inevitability of some desperate person really needing it?

On the same day that I first heard about Daniel Suelo, I came across a Sioux Indian, John Lame Deer. He summarized how he felt about being made to use money – and hence become ‘civilized’ – by white men:

Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can’t have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, teepee or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money and therefore a man’s worth couldn’t be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorney or politicians, therefore we couldn’t cheat. We were in a really bad way before the white man came and I don’t know how we managed to get along without the basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.

Daniel Suelo, Heidemaire, and I have slightly different core reasons for wanting to live without money. I prefer not to focus on minor differences, but rather to see that which we share. A
common thread links the three of us: our desires to see friendships grow between local people through the simple act of sharing, and to see the spirits of kindness and giving reign over greed.

There was an irony in my life. Spending so much time speaking and writing about creating friendships through sharing, and the importance of rebuilding the communities we live in, left very little time for my own life! In the middle of May, to remedy this, I decided to start having a lot more fun with my friends. I hoped the imminent return of summer would mean a lot more playtime.

In the first few months of spring, I found I was still counting down the days to the end of my year, viewing it as something to get through, instead of a challenge to embrace. But by May, I found days on end were passing in which I didn’t even think about the ‘m’ word. Only when someone asked did it enter my consciousness. I loved living off the land, but spring was a time when all I seemed to do was work, as everything later in the year depended on how much sweat I spilled then. It was hard to think that the fruits of my labor were still far from ripening. But the time had come to start reaping what I had sowed.

Living without money in winter can seem really unappealing, but you’d have to be bonkers not to try it in the summer. Long evenings walking in the woods, camping by the beach at the weekend, cooking food that you’ve grown and picked yourself, cycling, listening to acoustic music by a camp fire, wandering in the wild foraging berries, apples and nuts, skinny-dipping in the lake, and sleeping under the stars. If you are tempted to try this way of life for just one season, summer is the perfect time.

The clocks had gone forward. It was officially British Summer Time and I was enjoying the longer evenings. This pleasure is, obviously, not specific to moneyless people. Everyone I know hates to see the clocks go back and I often wonder how we’ve agreed to something that none of us seem to want. When you cook, wash, work, and play outside, cycle everywhere and live off the land, you’re even more delighted to see the sun stay in the sky a bit longer each day. In the winter and spring there’d definitely been times when I felt the effect of not having money: the moment I’d heard my mates were going to see our favorite band
play a concert; the time they went to a movie I’d really liked to have seen. Now that summer was here, I forgot I was living without money. I simply lived.

Not only did I suddenly have a range of entertainment opportunities – things like camping, which had seemed so much less appealing in the colder months – but life was getting easier in all sorts of ways.

As much as I love cycling, doing more than eighty miles a week in the winter and early spring months was not always fun. Without the right gear, I often got soaked right through. Even if I didn’t wear waterproofs, I usually sweated so much that the result was no different. In a change that I loved, because it meant that my lifestyle was becoming normal for them, my friends kept telling me to get a waterproof, breathable jacket. ‘With what?’, I’d reply; such a thing had proved impossible to find on Freecycle during the wetter seasons.

When it rained heavily, the lights on my bike went on and off randomly. It took me the whole of March to realize this was down to some faulty wiring in my dynamo, which I immediately fixed. This had made cycling pretty stressful, as I’d suddenly and inexplicably find myself invisible to speeding motorists driving along country lanes barely wide enough for one car. When I heard an engine scream behind me, I’d either have to stand in the ditch until it passed or risk joining the dead badgers and foxes that dotted the side of the road.

But as the summer breezes began drifting through the valley, cycling became not just easier, but something I really wanted to do. Mountain biking is one of my favorite hobbies, so I often went adventuring with friends around Bristol, in places like Leigh Woods. We’d career down the little streams and muddy paths on
the steep hills of this huge estate. Off-road cycling is quite similar to life in some respects: if you want to enjoy it, it’s essential not to fear falling on your ass.

This pastime was pretty stupid and slightly irresponsible; mountain biking can be a fairly dangerous hobby. Normally, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but my moneyless status meant I couldn’t afford to break either my leg or my bike, because I couldn’t have paid to get either fixed. But life’s too short and too precious to be smart all the time. I decided long ago that I would rather live for fifty years than exist for ninety, and that if I lived my life exactly the way I wanted to at every moment, my time would be called whenever it was meant to be.

However, it wasn’t all mountain biking. Cycling is a fantastic way of getting to know the local area and reaching places completely inaccessible to motorists. In June, I started going for rides in the countryside, sometimes with friends who needed a break from the city and sometimes with the volunteer workers from the farm. There is something very wonderful about feeling the elements and sensing on your skin the change in temperature as the sun falls and rises that makes cycling feel so much more real than traveling by car or public transportation. We’d often go cycling at night, which I much prefer to cycling in the day, as you can go for an hour without meeting a single car. As the evenings got longer in the summer, we explored further. We’d shove three things in our packs – tent, sleeping bags, and a saddlebag of food – in case we decided to sleep wherever the road took us. Sometimes we’d camp overnight in woodland, or on the banks of a nearby lake, and make our way back in the morning. Or if we got tired and wanted to lie back and look at the stars, we’d just stop, find a dry spot, and sleep until the sun woke us up.

One of the many reasons I love summer is the food. While the south west of England doesn’t quite have a Mediterranean climate, in a decent summer you can grow a wide variety of crops and around August, wild food is plentiful. I eat all kinds of different things in the summer. Not all of them every day of course – or I’d have put on even more than two stone over the year! This list doesn’t include the stuff I find randomly in trash cans.