Clutter

4/10/07
Knowing when to hold and when to let go is an art. Spending the weekend with a friend to help her clean up some areas in her house, I was able to be a witness rather than a participator in the process. As an outsider, it is easy just to get a large trash can and sweep the scraps of paper, letters, notes, store coupons into file #13. I also recognize that I don’t have the stamina to get up in the morning after a tedious and torturous drive, do horse tasks that I am uncomfortable doing, and then keeping rolling through major housekeeping as well as cooking a few meals for hour after hour for three days. I came home tired and a tired bonny is a disconcerting things to the surrounding people and pets. I wanted a day off.
You usually don’t sleep well in new surroundings and I found I had to go to the bathroom but resisted. I lay in bed for about an hour thinking, I can wait but finally knew that I needed to get up in order to sleep. Seven dogs have a mind of their own and when something is unusual or out of the ordinary, like a person leaving a bedroom room to go to the bathroom (which doesn’t have a door that the dogs can’t open) in the middle of the night, is a call for all 28 legs to hit the floor and all 14 paws to be placed ever so ungentle on your body. These are the times that you wish you didn’t have a night shirt and an also have a firm realization that the skin on your butt is tender. You sit on the toilet holding your head and face so that the paws and tongues are not too invasive and soon everyone returns to their former post, you are able to get up and go back to bed. What feels like seconds, you are jarred by the morning call for farm tasks and the dogs nose saying she has to go out urgently. You can identify. You try to get some clothes on before you run the seven dog gauntlet. Do the morning tasks at the barn, do the morning task with the dogs, do the morning tasks with breakfast and then back to the hold and let go.
I keep thinking what would I take if there were a flood and I had to leave in minutes. The first items are easy.. my hairy girl friend and two screaming cats. Then what... my computer.. my alter.. my pictures....what would not be replaceable or not needed. I keep thinking, what if I had to downsize.. to a small apt... TV.. bed.. some clothes... to a nursing home – a chair and four drawers.
When you look at someone else’s stuff, it is easy to say.. off with your heads... out the door.. but your own stuff – Is it greed? – having to have and hold on to.. ownership.. Is it scarcity? – I don’t have the money to replace it...even if it has not been used or looked at for a long time. Is it trying to hold on to what is not or your past? Letters and pictures of people that have passes and stuff from travels long ago. Before I went to Thailand, I did not have 7 pair of Thai farmer pants and a rice cutter and a tobacco holder.. I lived without them, but now that they are here, they have taken their place in my important holdings. It doesn’t replace anything, it just adds to... on top of or underneath the other important holdings. I have yet to find someone who likes to live in clutter or filth, but we hold it for if our hands, hearts, house were empty, what would fill the space? Can we stand the silence of nothing or live with just a few well selected things. After all, if one pair of Chinese shoes is good.. ten pairs must be every so much more “better” and you never know when you will need that...