Paolo Soleri, from his essay "Relative Poverty and Frugality" (quoted, oddly enough, in Robert Aitken's
A Zen Wave: Basho's Haiku and Poetry):
The intent of relative poverty is not to suffer and to do penance for the sins of man and specifically for the sins of avarice, gluttony, and covetousness. It is instead to glorify life through the lean, conscious exercise of one's energies in the face of odds which, when understood cannot but show themselves as "overwhelming."
nyxie and I have been "scaling back", "simplifying", "downsizing" and all sorts of other things which all mean intentionally getting by with less; our 500-square-foot apartment, our plan to sell the car,
nyxie running her own clinic, me leaving the MBA to keep sysadminning and at a startup at that... I already knew what Soleri wrote but seeing it on the page like that reassured me that we're on a good path.
