Divesting Myself Of My Investments...

OK... living in this huge, lavish house for a week has finally cemented the realisation that our "stuff" really is a millstone around our necks in our current circumstances... 

It's costing us our mobility and flexibility, it's costing us money, sitting in storage, and it's costing our friends' energy, taking up space in their homes...

All "stuff" is energy, and while we're holding onto all this stuff, that's energy not available to us to live fully...

And it's creating an energetic block via the conflict between my mixed emotional needs - the need to live very simply and the need to have an outward manifestation of who I am, a reassurance that I exist, and an (illusory) sense of security...

So - I'm selling all the furniture now, except the boy's bed (he isn't ready for that, even though he hasn't slept in it for more than a year now!)... 

If you're in or near Seattle and you want to exchange cash for beautiful things for your space - furniture, rugs, lamps - then let me know; I've posted photos below, of what we have as it was set up in our last home...

I have to do this if we are going to go back to Australia anyway... might as well start now...

And some of you might have thought this was an obvious solution to my lack of cashflow, BUT, it's not so easy to give up what had meant "home" in one sense... besides, I'm a crab, astrologically - I hold on and I go at things sideways!...

I remember my parents coming with me and my sister from Holland to New Zealand, with all of their lives contained in four wooden tea-chests... and how they worked hard and played by the rules to make a home for us all - and what a toll that took on an already dysfunctional relationship (as it's doing in this family we are staying with)... and how each of them died "owning" a modest amount of "stuff", still paying mortgages, sick and lonely and unhappy...

And I remember 20 years' as a military wife, moving every 9-24 months, just when I had gotten our houses - both rental and owned - looking/feeling like a home...

And I remember coming to the US with the boy, with 46 years' of my life, and 8 months' of his, all contained in 24 boxes...

And I remember creating the home you see here in these photos for me and the boy - the only home we have had in the past 10 years...

And some might think that this is the last of the slide into the gutter, and marks us out as failures in life...

But why shouldn't this be happening to us?   What makes us so special?

People all over this planet have been having to make this choice over the past several millenia.. 

More and more people are facing this reality daily in the "west", and even in these circumstances, we have much more than billions of others on the planet...

And I look at how people in this house are doing life - despite the fact that both adults are working and making good money, they're only holding onto all their beautiful stuff by the skin of their teeth, and I know that we're all going to have to go there, in one form or another, because this way of living on this planet cannot go on... 

And a Facebook friend commented that nomadic life may be the way of the future as we try to avoid flood and storms and drought.   If we work on it now, we may be able to do it well.

As I tell the boy, just as always in my life, we're living ahead of the curve, riding the front edge of the wave...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Act Of God...

Saturday morning...

Surrounded by stuff, some in boxes, more waiting to be packed up and moved...

Thank god it doesn't all have to be done in one day, though it would make the utmost practical sense to get it over and done with...

Stuff...

Hate it...

It needs caring for, cleaning...

 - though cleaning could be considered an act of genocide, with each swipe of the cloth killing billions of microbes!

It takes up energy, time, attention, space...

It cramps my style - I can't just get up and go whenever an amazing opportunity for new adventure comes along...

It's a ball and chain around my ankle...

I want to do what I challenged others to do on a Facebook thread about the global energy/food crisis and our own personal responsibility in that - reduce all my possessions down to 20% of what I have now, and live in a space that is 20% of  what we now occupy...

Better yet - give it all away and walk the earth with nothing but a begging bowl, doing what I can where I can...

 Stuff...

Love it...

It gives me a 3D sense of continuity, of travelling my life path, of connections I've made, places I've been, people I love and who love me...

I've got a gift for 'arranging' it, decorating houses, creating warm, inviting, calm spaces that people tell me are like a "sanctuary" and they say they wish they could do what I do...

It brightens my world with beauty and light, with imagination and memory, with colour, texture and sound... 

- though I'm surrounded by that in every dimension, in all of the eternal now, if I have eyes to see and the awareness to be awake to it...

In some weird way, it makes me real, solid, in 3D... 

Or I think it does...

As though my stuff is me?

Who am I without my stuff?

Would I cease to exist?

Would I have existed at all, if I don't leave any stuff behind as evidence?

- and does any of my stuff mean anything to anyone else, or will it just be nuisance clutter, to be given away, dumped, discarded, after I cease to be physical?

 

When I took my first family of kids to live in Australia in 1996, we were without our 'stuff' for more than three months.

Through some mistake, our own 'stuff' sat in a container on a wharf for that time, instead of being shipped to Brisbane.

So I had to rent and buy basic household necessities while we waited for our 'stuff'...

Three months without art, music, books, knick-knacks, personal items filling the space we were inhabiting...

We didn't miss it at all...

And then the boxes etc were delivered and there was the fun of unpacking and remembering and choosing where things would sit/fit best energetically...

And in a week or two, it was all being taken for granted again, a backdrop to the routine of living... 

In many ways a limited and limiting definition of who we were, as individuals and as a family...

A self-created prison... a mask, a facade, a half truth and a half lie of who we are that we present to ourselves and project out to the world...

My higher Self wants to let it all go...

My small self wants to hold on...

I would not grieve if an Act of God destroyed all our earthly possessions...

Do I have the will and strength to be that Act of God?

Do I have the right to make this choice for my son?