Stuff

Since I've been looking to make a cross-country move for the past year, I'd already started letting go of possessions; mostly giving them to local charities or to acquaintances. I've had this deep desire for my life to be portable. Able to change direction on a dime and move when I have to, without having to carry a lot of things or consider how I'm going to take them with me. To live more simply.

Americans have so much stuff. We build big houses to accommodate all of our things and buy SUVs so we can carry it around with us. We acquire things, and then keep shoving what we have to the back of our shelves and closets to make room for more things. I expect that if you asked most folks to list all of their possessions, they couldn't do it. I don't think we generally realize how much energy it requires, physically and psychically, to maintain the things we own.

During the last couple of years, my intention has been to physically touch everything that was in my house and make the conscious decision whether it was to stay or go. Even so, for the past few months prior to the hurricane, I still had the feeling of being tied down by my possessions.

I guess I don't have that problem anymore.

Even after the hurricane, I'm still in the process of letting go. I will not be keeping all of the few things I was able to rescue from my house after Katrina. During the first few days after the storm, while I was still in shock knowing that I had probably lost everything, even so I felt lighter, freer, and I have heard some other Katrina survivors say the same thing. The last bit of heaviness has been in going back to the destruction and doing the salvage work, as well as the work I am doing here in Baton Rouge, cleaning up my few remaining possessions and deciding what to do with them.

I thought about not going back to see my house at all, but that didn't feel quite right. Maybe needing some closure; it was like having one foot in one world (the past? the old paradigm?) and the other foot in another world (the future? the new paradigm?)

What I want is to have the things -- I guess I could expand this to include people, places, and circumstances -- that serve me, and for me to relate to them on that basis in healthy ways, instead of with attachment, addiction, or fear.

Comments

[marlaine]

hi kitty!
it is nice to meet you :)
i am so humbled by your optimism - even after the difficulties you've had to endure of late
i've been trying to get 'lighter' as well...
it sounds as if some zen[?] philosophy is helping you to deal with all of this
you're very inspiring to me
thanks for sharing all of this with us
it makes me realize the importance/impermanence of things/people - a lesson i so desperately need to learn
xo

[Kitty]

Thanks, Marlaine. Glad to see you here. It's nice to know that other folks are getting something from what I'm writing. I almost had no choice in starting this blog; it was very insistent about being written. :)

I've been walking my spiritual path (including various forms of Buddhism) for a while now. Katrina has been a major stripping away, paring down, burning through. Talk about some serious spiritual practice :). It's also helped me see how far I'd already come.

Thanks for your kind words.