on the path to a centered life

Minimalism and Sacred Spaces

 

Sacred spaces are not exclusively places of worship, but they are places where we are more keenly aware of an existence outside the mundane, the temporal, the profane. They can be found in nature and in manmade structures, and surely they can be found in other parts of the universe. Yoga and meditation can even help us find such spaces within the infinity of our own minds and bodies. Sacred spaces can be collectively recognized, such as Mecca, or recognized by only ourselves, such as a spot in a garden, or in a room of one’s own. It’s the place where we just know.

A common experience among those who have decluttered is a heightened awareness of the value of space and time. By facing the collected detritus of shopping, waste, and distractions, we give ourselves a chance to restore harmony with what is most important in our brief lives, and to improve the quality of our lives by making much more of what time and space we have. Space and time take on such value that they can be considered sacred concepts. Both are needed, I think, to properly experience the other.

There are many ways of selecting or arranging spaces for ultimate benefit, such as feng shui, and other traditional methods. Consciousness of the spirit of a place, the Read more »

TV Habits, Old and New

Unlike a lot of other Minimalists, we still have a tv, and watch it regularly. And yes, it’s a fairly good-sized flat screen Sony Bravia, cost a lot of money at the time, and I’ve never been in any hurry to throw it out the window, even when the programming has been less than stellar. We like to watch movies via Netflix DVDs on a screen that is easy on the eyes. We like getting the news, a few laughs, and watching good movies, and getting a feel for what is going on in American culture and politics–all of which can be had, at least up to a point, by watching television.

But only up to a point. The increasingly annoying commercials and insipid shows have been wearing thin for a long time. The only reason we even had Basic cable was because I need closed-captioning, and captions via antenna reception have always been unstable in this area. Once local channels went from analog to digital, however, the captioning actually got worse! Even PBS stations failed to broadcast many programs that were listed as closed-captioned. And captions on programs have an annoying delay of 5-10 seconds, then all go by in a blur as they catch up to the dialogue. This may be a problem unique to Comcast cable, but I don’t know–hard to compare when there’s a local monopoly. The only way around this is streaming, and since our DVD player was about to bite the dust, it was time to either replace it or to attempt all streamed content–but not both. Read more »

Winding Down With the Year

When you write a lot, the flow lets you write even more. This goes on happily until something comes along to stop it in its tracks, whether it is writer’s block, a life event, or little things like a leaking roof or a sick cat. Trying to get back into the flow can take a while, especially if the interruption occurred during the crucial early parts of a new project or a new phase of an existing project. But that’s okay. When it happens often enough, you come to realize that the flow does indeed come back, and it’s best not to worry about it too much. A good way to wait it out is to just touch base with your people, writing an update like I’m doing with this post

I spent November participating in the National Novel Writing Month, and am happy to say that I reached my 50,000+ words, as the badge at left attests. I was also pleasantly surprised to learn that winners also had the opportunity to purchase the writer’s software called Scrivener at half price, and to get five print copies of one’s novel for free from CreateSpace, both of which I plan to take advantage of very soon.

Scrivener has a one-month trial download, complete with tutorial, which I’ve done and it is pretty comprehensive. When my “flow” comes back, I plan to use it for the second draft of the novel that I wrote in November, and hope that it doesn’t cause me to lose my flow all over again in the midst of the learning curve.

The Minimalist Woman’s Guide to Having it All is selling like hotcakes over at Read more »

Being Right vs Making Things Right

Being Right is a life or death deal for a lot of us. Plenty of self-help and relationship advisors have pointed out that arguments start and escalate because it is so hard to let go of the need to be right, to have our opinion of what is right prevail. Some people are more prone to this than others; for them, successfully asserting their Rightness and getting everyone to agree that they’re right is a validation of ego, of existence. The harder they fight to Be Right, the more likely this is the case. Any number of things can cause them to be like that, from simply not knowing any other way to be in the world, or from being fed up after a lifetime of caving to someone who needed to Be Right.

American culture is particularly rife with Being Righters, as it rewards individualism above the collective good, rewards the patriarchal/matriarchal group/family structure, worships heroes, and gives equal weight to all arguments, no matter how specious, because each individual is entitled to assert his notion of right. This makes our culture particularly prone to letting the loudest voices or the richest voices win–not the voices speaking for everyone’s best interests, or the most logical ones.

Being Right forces all one’s eggs into a single basket of convictions. At its most Read more »

Looking Around (and Under) the ‘Hood

Our little 1920 house sits on a corner lot very close to the charming old downtown of a small Indiana city. There was an abandoned bungalow right around the corner when we moved here five years ago, but that was soon torn down. The city bought the lot, and the lot of another house next to it that was already torn down when we moved here, with the intention of turning those lots into an extra parking lot for the YMCA across the street from our front door. The YMCA decided, however, to build a new facility and moved away to the north side of town, so instead of a parking lot there is a nice big swath of green space behind our house. Past the green space there is a small older parking lot for the the city hall by day (and for the community theater across the street by night), and past that (making it the corner of our block on the next street down) there is an abandoned two-story apartment building.

Or, there was. A large piece of machinery suddenly appeared one day, huddled up next to the old building, and every so often someone operated it, using the scoop bucket to rip down the sides and porches, and moving the debris into a huge dumpster. The picture above is from a few days ago. As of yesterday, the building is completely gone, the foundation hole has been filled in with clean sand, and we can see all the way from our street to the corner house on the next street over.

The first day the walls came down, the entire block smelled like a charnel house, reeking of dead animals, rotting wood and paper, years of damp and neglect. Its very existence was not only a downer in ways everyone could see, but it was also quietly cursing the neighborhood with its foulness. It affected us much less than the folks who lived next to it, but it was there, it was visible from our garden and side doors. We passed it all the time because we’re on a one-way street and we need to turn at that corner if we want to go in any other direction.

With every derelict house that comes down, the neighborhood feels a little lighter, a little less bogged down by sadness and tragedy. Every house, whether old or new, in good condition or bad, has its stories of happiness and sadness, of celebration and despair. When sadness and tragedy prevail in any house, decrepitude sets in, and often, finally, abandonment and decay. And there they stand, these old monuments to the worst in life, weighing down our minds and microcosm, holding us back from fresh air, beauty, health, and hope. We have to let them go, and even forcibly remove them–to release the places of sadness back to the universe, to allow something better to come of the space that remains. The process might take time and release some noxious stuff, but when the dust settles, it’s like seeing a brand new world.

The guy who lives across the street from the torn-down apartment house has only lived there for a couple of years, but he goes all out on holidays, bedecking his house with lights. I don’t think it is a coincidence that he doubled the number of lights a couple of nights ago. When we look out that way, or drive by, this is what we see now:

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