Satish Kumar's Serene Spirituality

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While most of the magazine's work goes on in a converted stone barn a few steps from the front door, the cottage's living room doubles as Satish's office. He sits at the big wood desk while we talk. "My major idea is that we need to change consciousness," Satish says. He is a small man, wiry and dapperly dressed, with a gray goatee and intense brown eyes. "We live under the power of modern consciousness, which means that we are obsessed with progress. Wherever you are is not good enough. We always want to achieve something, rather than experience something. The opposite of this is spiritual consciousness. By that I mean you find enchantment in every action you do, rather than just in the results of your action.

"Spiritual consciousness is not a particular religion," he adds, "but a way of being." Explaining its tenets in Path Without Destination, he translates a chant that Mahatma Gandhi composed for morning and evening meditation: Nonviolence, truth, nonstealing, / Sacred sex, nonconsumerism, / Physical work, avoidance of bad taste, / Fearlessness, respect for all religions,/ Local economy and respect for all beings. / These 11 principles / Should be followed with humility, care, and commitment.

"These principles are not do's and don'ts," Satish writes. "They are not vows; they are aspirations and inspirations. They are like resolutions which are made on the eve of a new year. . . . They could be used as resolutions for the new millennium."

Although such thoughts seem quixotic, it's a mistake to underestimate Satish, says his longtime friend Richard Boston. "His gentleness is accompanied by a will of steel," Boston says. "His schemes are apparently absurd in their Utopianism, but turn out to be quite practical. He is a great deal more hardheaded, shrewder, more canny than he appears at first.”

I know what he means. A small but important part of the reason I'm in England trailing Satish through a soggy landscape is to understand how I came to write a column in Resurgence for absolutely no pay. My freelance writing income covers a sizable portion of my family's budget, but when Satish, to whom I'd never spoken before, contacted me several years ago to write the magazine's Letter from America, I immediately agreed without even thinking about money. To say no to Satish, who speaks in an elegant, melodious flow of Indian-accented English, would feel like turning down a prestigious, hard-won honor. No one published in Resurgence has ever seen a pence for their labors, and the list includes luminaries like Václav Havel, Gary Snyder, Ted Hughes, James Hillman, Winona LaDuke, Wendell Berry, Susan Griffin, Ivan Illich, and Noam Chomsky.

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