The Abundance of Less

"Nakamura and I were sitting there drinking tea on a winter's day at his fire pit in the middle of the floor, and the shoji screens were open. We were looking across the valley; the snow was clinging to the cedar boughs, and the wind would come up throwing these sheets of powdered snow into the air. Mist was hiding the branches of the trees, and then revealing them. It felt like a Chinese ink painting from the T'ang Dynasty. You'd get a powerful feeling of this, and of the poetry of rural life. 

So, even though that's not the goal, and there's going out to gather firewood every day, there's a sense of the good parts of living a life. I mean, what is romance? It's love, right? It's a sense of love for the Earth, of love for nature, and it comes not as the purpose, but maybe as a natural result of living closer to materials such as wood and stone, clay and pottery, and fire and water, as opposed to plastic and electronics, phone wires and all the commercials. I mean, there's the feel of a plastic chair versus the feel of a wooden chair, or the feeling of a straw mat versus the feeling of a concrete floor." 

Andy Couturier is a writing instructor, and author of, "The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan." He shares more from his unusual life journey in this in-depth interview.

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