A leaf fell softly from one of the big oak trees today when I was outside turning my garden. It still had a little green left around the veins, but was mostly yellow with hints of crimson. I paused and savored the moment. I felt grateful for my good life: a tapestry of simple pleasures. It's been a year since the economic crash. For many Americans, this has been the hardest year of their lives. They have lost jobs, homes, retirement funds, income and investments. Many are servicing so much debt-load that they feel oppressed by their own lives.

      My pantry and freezers are full from the produce from this summer's garden and the woodpile is stacked. I am in excellent health from riding my bicycle to town and back, in the fresh air and sunshine, for errands. There is plenty of new hay, for which I bartered, in the barn to feed the horses over the winter. I remember my Grandmother talking about living through the Great Depression. She looked into the distance with a faint smile on her lips, reminiscing about raising her small children on a subsistence farm during the rockiest of financial times that America, at that time, had ever seen. She recalled, "we barely knew that the Depression was going on" as she recounted how their lifestyle had buffered them from hardship. Today, we would call their 'subsistence' farm a 'sustainable' farm--or a permaculture venture. In many ways, my lifestyle has been an incremental reversion, over the years, to that of my grandparents.

      The blueprint drawn by Scott and Helen Nearing also helped forge my own life path. So, when the markets fell in 2008--with the subsequent waves of foreclosures, layoffs and monetary devaluation--like my grandmother and the Nearings--I was insulated. The lifestyle that I had created for myself over the past 25 years was sustainable: voluntarily simple and purposeful. My fertile, organic gardens, animal husbandry skills and practice of living simply on the land provided me with freedom from anxiety and tension and an opportunity to live harmoniously in an increasingly complicated world. My life has taught me that contemporary consumer culture inflames the hunting-and-gathering instinct beyond need, and even beyond wanting. It fosters an addiction to wanting and greed for which the correction might only be to move away from induced neediness towards the sanity of satiety--to move away from the peripatetic search for "more" towards "enough".

      American's are subconsciously driven by a perverted interpretation of social Darwinism that assumes that survival is necessarily competitive. The feminine archetype, preferring cooperation, has been reduced to a mere concept in the pace of the contemporary fast lane. The ego, terrified of annihilation, rushes toward it's own survival at the expense of exploiting others and the earth. Our souls--our most essential nature--aren't concerned with survival. Our souls are immortal and eternal and, somewhere--buried underneath all of the noise in our heads--we know that. It is the ego that fights to survive. It hangs on for dear life. It also pushes, tramples, scrambles and batters its way to more, more, more. It never has enough. Big business plays on the ego's lust. When the ego wants 'more', the products are there to buy.

      Somewhere along the way, the lines between democracy and capitalism got very blurry. And, when they did, 'citizens' turned into 'consumers'. People were no longer members of an interconnected social fabric, known as community, but became cogs in the wheels of an ever-expanding economic system. This is the way that we have done business for decades. But, the past year has made it overtly obvious that it is not sustainable. We, can't, as a culture, just go back to business as usual. This time, we have to create something new. This is a turning point.

      The recent market crash, while not without its share of heart-breaking stories, offers Americans an opportunity. It offers the opportunity to make a course correction that would allow people to take their lives into their own hands and live in a simpler, less routinized, more socially sensible manner. Right now, there is an option available: to exchange high-rises and fluorescent lights, suburbs and office cubicles, processed air, food and water, the proverbial Joneses, and those ubiquitous racing rats equipped with cell phones and beepers with feeling the sun, or the wind and rain on our faces, organic garden produce in our bellies and a much slower pace of life. There is growing interest in becoming freed from consumerism while still being an active participant in society. People are thinking about reclaiming themselves as 'citizens' instead of as 'consumers'.

      Changing from a 'market economy', which, in the words of the Nearings, "seeks by ballyhoo to bamboozle consumers into buying things they neither need nor want, thus compelling them to sell their labor power as a means of paying for their purchases" to a 'use economy', in which there is an integrated balance of good friends, live soil, social awareness, vital food, and recreation would promote active participation in the advancement of social justice, creative integration of the life of the mind, body and spirit, and deliberate choice in living responsibly. Twenty-first century pioneers can make a choice to craft a lifestyle that honors work, viewing it as one aspect of the self-development process, without denying time for contemplation or recreation.

      This book is about my own journey to sustainability--getting outside of the box and being more authentically human. It's about not viewing wealth as money, but as something much more holistic and broad. The recent global markets downturn is an opportunity to reintegrate with our most essential selves. It is a time, not without some suffering, that we can step outside of our roles and inhabit our souls. But, it's not just my journey: it's one that anyone can choose. Each person has to make their own map, find their own way. My work has broken open the ground before you as surely as if I'd gotten up a little earlier than you did and, forceful in the powerful morning light, turned over a garden of healthy, vital soil. It's all there for you, ready, if you choose to dig and plant.

                                                                                              --  Sherry L. Ackerman, 2010