The bittersweetness of last summer things

Coming home this evening, I stopped at a local flower grower and bought 10 sunflowers.

They are the last ones of the summer.  For two days now, I passed them, waiting in white gallon buckets under a roadside tent, on my way to and from work. I hesitated buying them, because it would be a tacit acknowledgement that the summer has moved on, and only its vestiges remain.  

Even so, I love fall. Every weekday, I've been driving the back roads to work and enjoying the gradual reddening of the trees, corn husks standing sentinel in the fields, and farm trucks loaded with beach ball-sized pumpkins. But here I am, reveling in these huge, solar blooms.


And as beautiful as they are, you're probably wondering what do sunflowers have to do with uncluttering and unhouseholding, right? I have to say that they remind of me of the transience of material things...just like the final flowers in October. 

The stuff that owns us is transient. We use it for a while and we wear it out or we give it away or sell it--or when all else fails, we dispose of it properly, I hope.

It doesn't really work in the big scheme of things to keep all of it, all the time. This is a big revelation for me. It isn't because I'm especially materialistic. I just didn't know how to let go of some stuff. But it's getting a little easier every day.  

I gave away a set of 25-year-old porch furniture recently.  I finally figured out that the only reason I kept it was because it used to live on the sunporch at my parents' house. When I would visit, I liked to fall asleep on the chaise lounge from the old set. But I don't do that on my own porch. Maybe I must have been trying to hold on to the memories through these white and yellow plastic chairs.

But since the summer's gone, so must go the old porch furniture. The transience of stuff finally makes sense to me, and clearing the clutter--and the fog of ambivalence around it--is becoming less difficult.


Thanks to Karen Kingston's Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui for prompting my thoughts for this blog.

3.5 Focal Points

I have a couple of new beginnings in my life right now: a new contract job and part-time graduate school. Time management is sometimes a big challenge for me: I want to take on too many activities, then I become overwhelmed and end up scrapping some of my projects.

This time around I decided to pare down the things that are important to me. Three and a half things is the number I've chosen to work with, especially after reading Ev Bogue's blog post Triangular Focus. I couldn't quite bring myself to stick with three, and four seemed like too much. So, why not 3.5?

Here they are:

• Work--leaving old job this week and expecting a relatively steep learning curve on the new one.
• School--two online courses in Information Science at the graduate level.
• Health--taking better care of my health and maintaining good health for my furry child, Justi. (See below.)  For both of us, it means regular exercise, adequate sleep, and eating well. Justi will help with maintaining perspective and balance:)

And my half-focal point? Creative pursuits and projects. At first, I winced at the idea of having a half-focal point, especially one that involved my writing and art projects. But I've come to realize that, right now, I need to provide myself with the livelihood that will give me the most freedom, ultimately. 

Yes, the half-focal point is a compromise, but it will also provide me with the incentive to make the best of the time I devote to creative work. And maybe-just-maybe, I'll make the time to do the work more meaningful in this way.

Next comes scheduling for the  big 3.5. I'll be using Google calendar and maybe some pie charts to help me visually understand where my time should be going. After all, when you take away all the physical and mental clutter, all we have is time...and each other.

Letting Go of Stuff in the Middle Ages

This isn't a post about the days of pre-Renaissance ruffians contributing to the Bubonic plague by tossing their refuse out of second-story windows. Sorry, but no.

This post is about getting rid of stuff collected over the years in my Middle Age...and perhaps yours.

While I very much enjoy reading inspiring posts from young bloggers, like Tynan's Life Outside the Box or Ev Bogue's evolution, it seems to me that getting rid of stuff for them is a far different process than for me. For example, Tynan placed an ad on Craigslist to invite strangers to come and take what they wanted from his house in the space of one day when he was ready to travel the world possession-free. Ev burned many of his belongings, and what he kept he was able to fit into a backpack.

Both are admirable ways of freeing oneself  from one's worldly goods in order to do one's life-work unhindered, but they are young people's ways of doing it.

Having accumulated a houseful of stuff over the years is a gradual process. It's true that every time I've moved over the past 20 years or so (maybe 8 or 9 times), I've shed some of my detritus and unnecessaries.

But much remains to be done-- and for me, it's really like peeling layers of an onion.  I try to focus on one area, like my bedroom closet by taking three 42-gallon bags of clothing to Goodwill or an armload of dresses to the local consignment shop. It's an organic process--in the coming months, I will be experimenting with various processes, such as 27 things in 9 days or filling one bag with unwanted items each week for a month to donate to charity.

The main thing for me is that the stuff in my house didn't multiply exponentially overnight, like mushrooms. It took years (ugh). And I don't want to leave it as my legacy. Time to work on it but also time to be patient in this gradual sloughing-off of many years' collection.

How about you? Do you kick extra stuff in your house to the curb immediately? Or, is it a steady release of unwanted items over time? Also: is a slow process only for those of us with more miles on the odometer?

Back to the old turf

I'm back. I doubt if I made a dent in the blogosphere the last time I posted. I apologize to anyone who wondered where I was for the past year.

If you're wondering why such a long hiatus, here are some reasons (excuses?):

I worked both in my non-profit job onsite and my ontology job offsite.  Family members with health problems needed help.  I fell into an awesome yet overwhelming long-distance relationship.  I spent lots of time thinking about this post and the ones that will follow.

And I decided to come back to my blog, because I want to share what I'm discovering with you.  I want to know what you think, too.

It's good to be back.  I hope you'll stick around.