consciously choosing to not pursue climbing the ladder of the American dream. Smaller living spaces, simple living, done with reconciliation and relationship as the goal.

For the practitioners (of downward mobility), the people who are trying to live this out, in one or two or twenty very small ways; to the people living with mice and cockroaches and bedbugs, those with neighbors who slam doors in their faces or cook them a lovely pot of curry; those who lay awake at night thinking about violence and abuse and neglect and grief; for those with one coat or one bike or pots with no lids; for those who work all day with little or no recognition, who hang out with the mentally ill and the lonely and the brusque; for those who love the urine-soaked city streets and the quiet rural poor; for those that cook big pots of lentil soup, who leave the doors unlocked, who see the world as big and broken and offer up what little you have, the tiny, laughable loaves and fishes of your life, your privilege, your face, your body, your hands and face and smile, day after day after day, in the neighborhoods far from where you grew up:
I love you.
May the peace of Christ be with you, wherever he may send you.

 – taken from D.L. Mayfield’s ‘A Few Words on Downward Mobility’