NC LIVE eBook collection. - Simple living: one couples search for a better life

Copyright Frank Levering and Wanda Urbanska, 1992
All rights reserved

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, 1992
First John F. Blair, Publisher, edition published in 2003

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from The Manifestation from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.
Copyright 1959 by Beatrice Roethke, Administratrix of the estate of Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levering, Frank.

Simple living : one couples search for a better life / by Frank Levering and Wanda Urbanska ; foreword by Linda Fuller.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York, N.Y. : Viking, 1992. With new foreword.

ISBN 0-89587-289-7 (alk. paper)

1. Farm lifeVirginiaOrchard Gap. 2. OrchardsVirginiaOrchard Gap. 3. Levering, Frank. 4. Urbanska, Wanda, 1956- I. Urbanska, Wanda, 1956- II. Title.

S521.5.V8L48 2003
630'.9755714dc21

2003012179

To our families

Contents

The saints are simply those men and women who relish the event of life as a gift and who realize that the only way to honor such a gift is to give it away.

William Stringfellow

God did not create poverty; human beings did when they refused to share.

Mother Teresa

Millard and I had the privilege of meeting Wanda Urbanska and Frank Levering when they interviewed us for the first edition of Simple Living more than a decade ago. We had a lively and memorable conversation with them in the living room of our home near downtown Americus, Georgia. Their struggles and triumphswhich they recount freely and honestly in the bookare reminiscent of our own.

A crisis in our marriage caused us to rethink our emphasis on acquiring more and more wealth. We took drastic steps to simplify our lifestyle and began our search to serve God by serving humanity. That was the best decision we ever made, one we have never once regretted. Our lives are now full and running over with true riches.

In Frank and Wanda, we saw a reflection of ourselves. They were hard workers. They were ambitious to spread a new message and encourage another way of living, just as we have been through two-and-one-half decades of ministry with Habitat for Humanity. Like us, they were idealistic. Their ministry of simplicity appealed to the consciences of individuals and organizations to examine their ways and improve quality of life for themselves and others. They embraced small-town life and set up shop in Franks native city of Mount Airy North Carolinaa rural, somewhat economically depressed part of the country.

Over the years, we have seen Wanda and Frank numerous times since we first met. Mount Airy has become something of a second home for me as I travel to North Carolina to attend meetings of the National Advisory Board for the Simple Living television series, which Wanda and Frank are spearheading.

Wanda and Franks goal of lifestyle simplification is compatible with the values Millard and I espouse in our personal lives as well as with the values of Habitat for Humanity International. We believe that as each person voluntarily and passionately embraces simple-living values, there is a tremendous potential to positively impact millions, beginning with our own neighborhood and extending throughout the world.

Simple Living will help readers examine their values and lifestyles from the perspective of how much they want versus how much they need. It will also help readers to discover the joy that comes in giving and doing for others. These ideas, once put into practice, make for a sustainable life for all on this earthly habitat we share and call home.

Linda C. Fuller

Co-founder, Habitat for Humanity

International

April 2003

Simple Living would not have been possible without the support of many along the way. We are grateful to Pamela G. Dorman at Viking for her keen editorial eye and her strong guidance throughout. Paris Wald at Viking, too, was a helpful and perennially upbeat presence. Charlotte Sheedy, Elaine Markson and Geri Thoma deserve credit for their vital roles in the life of this project. We are delighted to work with Carolyn Sakowski and her staff at John F. Blair, Publisher, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on this new edition of Simple Living.

The following people we wish to thank for their loyalty and lovethe late Edmund Stephen Urbanski; Jane Urbanski Robbins; Marie Olesen Urbanski Whittaker and the late Joseph B. Whittaker; the late Sam and Miriam Lindsey Levering; Elizabeth Smith Lindsey and the late Alton Lindsey; Al and Betty Lindsey Wellons; Margaret Olesen Corbin; Ruth Olesen Kelley; Bill Van Hoy and the late Lois Levering Van Hoy; Ralph and Patty Webb Levering; Teresa Van Hoy; Montague Levering Kern; Betsy Levering Morgan; Merry Levering; Lou Lindsey; Virginia Levering Price and Tom and Sondra Upton Price. Thanks go to long-suffering and long-standing friends Bonni Kogen Brodnick; Liz Brody; Mal and Ellen Hoffs; Krysia Lindan; Stephanie von Hirschberg; Tison Lacy; Susan Christian; Tony Gittelson; Jamie Cabot; Howard Davis and Georgia Jones-Davis; Robin Brantley and Keith Love; Nick and Nancy Bragg; Pat Woltz; Copey Hanes; Burke Robertson; Ann L. Vaughn; Gene Rees; Bob and Helen Sekits; and Jamshid and Farzaneh Parvisi. We would like to thank the entire National Advisory Board for the Simple Living television series. We are delighted with the new friends the book helped us to make, and wish to thank the scores of people throughout the country who took us under their wing and into their confidence.

On a luminous April morning in 1986, a young couple arrived from Los Angeles at an old farmhouse on a Blue Ridge mountainside in Carroll County, Virginia. In long rows radiating from the house, cherry, peach, and apple trees bloomed in velvety shades of white and pinka vast sea of blossoms washing against a shoreline of ancient blue mountains stretching to the far horizon. We were that couple. That sloping Blue Ridge mountainside, its ancestral houses, legendary orchard, and the surrounding communities in southwest Virginia and northwest North Carolina were our new home.

This bookone of the fruits of that dramatic change in our livestells what many people have described since its first printing in 1992 as a classic tale: with the aid of family, friends, and guides as familiar as Henry David Thoreau and Helen and Scott Nearing, two people embark on the grand adventure of personal change. With adventure comes uncertainty, and a certain degree of risk, but we were determined to simplify our lives; to face any obstacle, any challenge that stood in the way of creating the personal freedom and enduring sense of meaning that are the savory fruits of a simpler life.

Three years after our arrival at Levering Orchard, the idea for a book on simple living itself seemed to pose an insurmountable obstacle. Simple livingwhats that, and who would want it? was the refrain from a chorus of New York publishing houses, responding to our queries proposing a book on the subject. The year 1989 marked the end of a decade of material extravagance, a high-rolling, self-aggrandizing era marked by an insatiable appetite for