Oct 16th- Clutter Bug

Living out of a backpack again is opening my eyes wide.

How is it that 3500 miles away I have, in my name, an entire house full of crap? How many times already on this trip have I realized I brought more t-shirts than I need (three would have been fine) and an extra sweater? But I remember being so sure before I left that I would be in the markets buying clothes the first week because I's run out.

And it's freeing. That's the greatest realization- I am so absolutely free without having to look after all of my things. No clothes to wash and dry and fold and put away. I don't have enough with me for it to ever become a mess to clean. Here's the kicker- I'm not loosing track of anything either, because I only have two or three items to keep an eye on.

Then the idea hits me.

I think that my life is too cluttered to know where to bring it next.

I am so heavy with all of my possessions and desire for money and comfort and “stuff”. My little wings are not strong enough to lift all of my belongings and soar. Just as wings are not given the strength to carry another, so they cannot carry all of a person's worldly accumulations. I have strength enough to carry myself high, high up to see over my life and the ways that I might travel. But with all of these belongings....dead weight. I sit on the ground and I dust my pretty things.

When I return home to my half renovated house, it is time to take stock of my possessions. It's time to cull the herd- to give away things I no longer use, and more importantly, to part with things I don't need. For the journey I am heading on, I will need to pack light, and I might be gone a long time. I don't want to return home to boxes of dusty belongings and think, “Why did I save that? Some one else could have been using it this whole time....”

I think that the next big step will be to stop buying things. I suppose that by going through each item that I own, I will be able to have a proper inventory. Maybe after labouring to cut my purses in half I will be less likely to want to buy a new one. That need I feel every time I see something I “have to have”- what is that? It seems so foreign where I sit right now, staring off out over the ocean, but I know myself well enough to know that with a return home, that need will also return.

And with that fix, the guilt that follows it. And with that guilt, the purposeful forgetting of whatever it is I had to have. And then I buy more. And more. And more.

When what I really need is a walk in the woods. What my soul is asking for is not a new hoodie, but time of solitude and meditation and communion Which is why in this place, when I am so full, I can't imagine filling my self by shopping.

So then, when my house is in order, I would like to commit to walking in the woods again, chasing the trail of my Muse. I wonder about this. It seems more likely that my Muse has never moved an inch, but these possessions, these heavy weights, have built a thick wall around my consciousness, and I can no longer hear the voice of my heart.

I remember so vividly the process of clearing my head when I spent my one night in the Cheakamus in June. The entire walk in to my campsite, the gibberish in my head swarmed about like mosquitoes, buzzing in my ears and making it impossible to channel pure thought. A whole night of solitude and silence, and my system was almost in....shock. Small pieces of consciousness, but no concise train of understanding. And then, half way back on the trail the following morning, and BAM! Suddenly the clouds parted, and the sun shone, and the writing flowed from me as it hasn't since I was a small child.

While the rain beat down on Cheakamus Lake, I set up my small tarp over a stump and wrote until my hand cramped. Hours passed by this way, grey and cold and joyful. I remember eating trail mix bars and drinking coffee from my thermos and quietly thanking the voice of my heart for dragging me out into the woods.

Just as I'm thanking it now for dragging me to Central America.

“...be herenow, learn to transform your poisons into honey, share your positivity and be nothing."

-Osho, “Life, Love, Laughter”