Throw It Away

Heard this for the first time today.  It was written and sung by Abbey Lincoln, who died on Saturday.  Awesome.

Dear money, part two

After we had a wonderful weekend with some dear folks, guests in our much-less-cluttered house, I started thinking again about treating money like a true friend.  (See my post of June 3.)  Here's what I came up with:

Money, to treat you like a friend...

I'd welcome you when you come for as long as you can stay.

I'd send you off with thanks and blessings.

I'd know our deep connection, even when I don't see you (for long periods!).

I'd never slam you behind your back or put down other friends you visit.

I wouldn't claim you as mine, or be jealous of your other friends. I'd even want to meet them, too.

I'd honor your freedom to move, and trust in our deep connection.

I'd know you come when you can, and know that I'll see you again.

But you don't live here.  You need to move to live.

And I'm happy to be part of your life.

The uncluttered mind

We can travel a long way and do many different things, but our deepest happiness is not born from accumulating new experiences. It is born from letting go of what is unnecessary, and knowing ourselves to be always at home. - Sharon Salzberg

Current events

Lots of other activities have slowed down (but not stopped!) my decluttering in the last couple of weeks.  D and I have been working on the garage together, where the clutter included an entire car we weren't using.  I got over my fear of the basement and will start going through that amazing collection soon.

I take scientific note of the fact that several weeks after clearing out the frightening closet in the Helpful People area of the house (a feng shui thing), I've had some great opportunities given to me by some very generous folks, most of whom are pretty new in my life.  Coincidence?  More experimentation is needed.  But who cares?  I have a clean closet AND some cool new friends.  It's all good.

Had a great little piece of reinforcement today.  A few weeks ago I took an armload of books and magazines off my shelves and brought them to my meditation group.  I told everybody to take whatever interested them and keep it or pass it around.   Today a friend told me that she was finding one of those books enormously beneficial.  I think if books can be happy, this one probably is.  It's being read and loved instead of just gathering respectful dust in my house.

So I started thinking about being not an endpoint but a way-station for stuff.  Possessions, money, ideas, energy all pass through me on their way to someone else.  I get the benefit as they go through, but so do others.

I remembered how my meditation teacher used to say of her talks, "Take what you need and set the rest aside for consideration later."  I think I may have been taking that statement too literally!  D phrased it better just now:  "Take what you need and pass on the rest."  I love that.  He also pointed out that one of the most successful people we know seems to operate that way all the time.

Keeping current, keeping in the flow.  What an adventure!

Q.E.D.

I'm working on a longer post (actually, three or four of them), but meanwhile an interesting thing just happened.  With books again, of course.

I was out in the garage, going through a long-neglected box of books that showed signs of having been examined by squirrels.  At any rate, I found two proofs of decluttering truths:

1.  If you keep it because you might need it later, you'll never find it if you do need it.  I had no clue when I took that online Latin course about five years ago that I actually owned a copy of the book we needed!  Gnawed by rodents now, of course.

2.  What you really need is easily accessible when you need it.  Of course, I was able to borrow the Latin text from our local library system.  And in the same squirrel-nest box of books, I found my copy of The Chosen, which I had just borrowed from the library and reread after many years.  (I mean just - I finished it yesterday.  It's still wonderful.)  It didn't matter that I "owned" a copy in my garage - when I needed to read Chaim Potok's first novel, I found I "owned" many copies at Homewood Public Library.  Which showed no signs of interest from furry creatures (at least, not nonhuman ones).

The moral?  What do you think?

Letting the old hope go

I'm finding that one of the reasons it's difficult to throw things away is that we feel we're throwing away the hope that the object represents.

For me, each of the hundreds of books on my overstuffed shelves represented The Answer when I bought it.  The questions were different at various times in my life, but each book was going to provide me with The Answer to my problems, doubts, and worries. Or at least An Answer.

I've always looked to books for insight, which isn't a problem, but it's hard to remember that the insight actually comes from within me, not from the paper and ink.  When I read something and have that Aha! moment, it's a recognition, not an alien invasion. Something inside my being knows the truth of what I'm reading.

And realistically, most of the books that really have sparked new awareness for me have been accidental finds.  I was looking for something else when I stumbled across Lovingkindness, the book that taught me a meditation that opened my heart.  (Of course, it was practicing the meditation, not the book sitting on my shelf, that changed me.)  Some of the books I desired most turned out to be not very inspiring, while others I was very skeptical about led me beside the still waters.

But the books that I love are not clutter.  I'm keeping those.  It's the ones that I so hoped would bring me solace, insight, joy, or peace - but didn't have that power.  My shelves sometimes seemed like a record of folly and failure.  It feels safer just to walk by, head down, and not look at them.  But going through them and choosing which to let go of is forgiving myself.  Forgiving myself for believing what I was taught, after all:  that things hold magic, that someone else is the expert on life, and that more is always better.

Maybe your thing isn't books.  Maybe it's clothing:  the fancy dress you hoped you'd wear at some mythical party that never happened; the tiny jeans you wanted to fit into; the coat that made you look like someone you wanted to be.

Maybe it's that complicated exercise machine that was going to create a new you.  The materials for that new hobby that never took off.  The fragrance that would lure a new love.

Shoes.  Sports equipment.  Anything that we collected not for the sheer joy of using it, but for what we hoped it would bring us.  In a sense, they're all burned-out cheap magic tricks.  We don't need them.  Our hope, our wisdom, our love doesn't come from them - despite what advertising has been telling us all our lives.

But I can testify, it takes a lot of courage to face all this and let go.  So far, it's worth it, though.

Starting small

Through this process, I'm learning a lot of things that I wouldn't have believed a short time ago.

One of them is how wonderful it is to DO something.  Anything, really, as long as it's in the direction I want to go.

There's an awful lot of change and discovery in the last two sentences.  For one thing, at earlier periods of my life (oh, maybe a few weeks ago!) I would have been searching for the right direction, as authorized by someone, something, or very likely some book.  I would have expected nothing good until the job was all done - whatever that means.  And I would certainly have doubted that cleaning out one corner of the garage or one drawer could be liberating, even exhilarating.

But that's what I found.  Somehow what I'm doing brings joy and energy.  The feeling isn't analytical or left-brained or correct or rational.  It's just wonderful and real.

Perhaps action from the heart is holographic:  every small piece contains the whole.  So clearing one little corner contains courage, and determination, and freedom, too.  Just like breathing one deep inhale is life-giving.

Do you ever worry about how you're going to keep on breathing all those breaths until the end of your life?  (If so, you're more neurotic than even I am!)  Nah.  It's just one breath at a time, and each one is wonderful.  Each one is just what you need, right now.

And each space you clear is another place for something new to enter.  Another bit of breathing room.