Healthy poverty

Somewhere between Denver and Minneapolis I decided to re-open Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, back before kids when I could read on planes.

I couldn't read past the first twenty pages without scribbling new words to add to my modest vocabulary or underlining nearly a whole page of her narrator's sharp observation.

“It is a dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple.”

That we would live the healthy poverty of simplicity and space.