minimalism, writing, and life

April 2012 Minimalist Shopping Update

Okay, time to pour a cuppa and let’s talk shopping update. A few weeks ago I changed my blog’s tag line to “essays on life after the clutter is gone.” Minimalism and simplifying don’t end after the big cleanout and epiphany–there is  also, I think, an ongoing realization that you’re flowing against the cultural stream, and possibly still exercising a lot of willpower to not fall off the no-shopping and no-clutter wagon.

It’s been twenty-nine months since I last used a credit card. The non-essential shopping trips have been kept to zero. Even when shopping for clothes, it is for specific things, whether at a resale shop or a department store. When I see a great bargain I ask myself how many books I need to sell to pay for it, and that usually stops me right in my tracks. Something really has to fit my body, my soul, and the way I actually live and dress these days, or I won’t buy it.

My closet is still pared down from participation in Project 333, and I heartily recommend going through at least two seasons of it to adjust your wardrobe perspective. Read more »

A Beautiful Cat

Our resident muse suddenly took ill and the vet could hardly hold back his tears as he tried to tell me just how bad things were. Tabby was at least fifteen years old, a kitten that had never grown up, and hid her problems well until the very last days. We’d been through the sadness of an aging cat before, but thought she had at least a couple more years of good life ahead of her. The vet went to call Steve and tell him what was going on and I sat in the examination room cuddling my poor tired dying cat and cried my heart out.

We are in that grief/change shadowland that comes with loss of a pet and all their routines and quirks. I awoke at dawn and there was no shadow of a cat in the hallway, where she’d wait for us to get up. It was eerily quiet when I made coffee, without needing to first give her a few treats to quiet her while Steve was still sleeping. It was too quiet and lonely when I sat down on the sofa with the coffee and she didn’t hop up next to me, warm, affectionate, and purring madly. She’s not sitting in my spot anymore when I come into the room.

There is a lot of cleaning going on, as now we can give Steve’s allergies a break (insofar as the cat contributed to them). While washing towels and blankets I broke down sobbing at the sight of the last washcloth I used to wipe down her fur after brushing her. She loved those brushings and we had a set routine for them, on top of the table in the laundry area in the basement. When we finished I’d give her a few treats and then deal with her litter box. I won’t miss the litter box, or all the cat hair all over the place despite the brushings. I’ll miss her companionship, though. If I needed an afternoon nap, I’d call “Cat nap!” and she’d hop up and join me. We were pals that way. A knitting project guaranteed her full attention and “help”. And she knew how to get me to take a break from the computer, too, or at least to scratch her chin with one hand and use the mouse in the other.

Tabby was Steve’s cat, as well, and they had their own routines. She sought him out for bits of cheese and protection during thunderstorms, for being held like a baby or a bit of rough play, and for rides on any furniture with wheels. And she was a most willing subject for his photographs, mugging for the camera and striking poses in beautiful light and shadows. I spent a couple of hours going through his archives and found so many wonderful photos of the cat both as a compositional element and as sheer Tabby-ness.

We loved her, and we had to let her go. Rest in peace, Tabby.

Ripples From the Fear of Change

It wasn’t my intention to start off the third year of this blog with over two weeks between posts. It isn’t because I’ve been too busy to write, or sick, or on vacation, or have writer’s block. It’s because there’s a little too much going on in my head, a lot of which I’m still sorting out–trying to understand, make sense of conflicting emotions and facts, and figuring out just where I stand on things or which course of action I want to take. We’ve all been there, to one extent or another; some of us have been there on a regular basis.

People are not simple, no matter how much they want to be. The sum of our genetics, environment, health, times, and chance is constantly changing. As that changing sum interacts with changing sum of others, it is amazing that there is any constancy in life at all, that people can form lifelong friendships, or work at the same job for thirty or forty years.

Constancy, however, requires positive reinforcement. For things to stay the same, avoiding pain (risking change, upheaval, financial ruin, etc.) is not enough–there has to be some key need being met in order to resist the overwhelming odds for change. When we Read more »

The Minimalist Woman is Turning Two

Adjusting the focus of a blog is a common, and also natural, occurrence. Some folks would say this blog doesn’t have much of a focus at all–it doesn’t lay out strategies for self-improvement, doesn’t get much into the how-to, doesn’t claim to be particularly helpful, and wanders around topics from clutter to relationships to knitting to politics, with occasional forays into clothes and trips down Memory Lane. In that sense, it certainly isn’t Minimalist.

Are you like me? Do you find yourself interested in a zillion different things, and wonder about their interconnectedness? It’s all out there and in ourselves; all these things we’re aware of–and not aware of–make up the world we live in. Making sense of it is as much a need as eating and sleeping, and it causes us to search out books and blogs and even write books and blogs, or channel it into painting, meditation, gardening, whatever.

Over time, this blog has moved from sharing my process of minimalizing possessions, clutter and activities to establishing a fairly consistent focus on essays from a Minimalist’s point of view. This means my point of view is of someone who now very rarely shops, has stepped back from consumerism, has gotten rid of a lifetime’s worth of clutter and takes pains to not accumulate more, lives in a comfortable but uncluttered small house, cooks simply with a minimum of equipment, and who has reined in multiple lines of employment to work from home as a writer. Life is definitely better with this less-is-more approach, more focused, more serene, and more naturally productive.

All those changes had an impact on my perspective. The realization of how much time, money, and effort I’d wasted in the course of my life thanks to consumerism made me think in turn of the role the acquisition of stuff has played in different relationships I’ve had, from marriage to parents to friends and colleagues. And it made me think, as well, of society as a whole, of our culture, our economy, our ecology, and our political issues.

All those changes also had an impact on my working life. Writing this blog enabled me to move from journaling to writing essays and ebooks, and more recently to return to writing fiction after a 30-year hiatus. There’s room in my head now, as well as in my life, to take an idea and turn it into a story, and to hopefully grow the craft in my own unique way. The one advantage of fiction over nonfiction is dimensionality, the presence of elements that are not part of dialectic, but which are part of the more inexplicable sides of human experience. It’s another way to make sense of it all, if in no other way than to connect with unreasonable truth.

So this blog will keep on keeping on in its own esoteric way, a place for those interested in what happens in this writer’s head–both directly and indirectly–after the decluttering, after the downsizing, after stepping back from the whole mad circus of consumerist culture. Sometimes I’ll post an update about what I’m working on or what I’ve published.

I’ve got a usually-daily Twitter “newspaper” called, of course, The Minimalist Woman Daily, containing linkposts from people I follow, mostly other Minimalists, writers and editors, a couple of artists, a couple of liberals, and some earth-huggers. It’s totally free. I find it handy to grab the best range of what people are tweeting about without having to scroll through the silly stuff. You can subscribe to it and/or click on the link to create your own paper.

Google+ has a couple advantages over blogging. One is the ease of discovering new blogs or writers in your areas of interest. The other is less spam in the comments. The latter is becoming an issue for me, so I’m considering the suggestion of some other Minimalist writers to close the comments on the blog itself, but open them up in Google+. I do not know if this will be a permanent arrangement, but more and more of the bloggers I follow are doing this and liking it a lot. Let me know what you think, or if you have done it yourself.

Anyway, that’s the state of the MW blog, which will be celebrating its second birthday next week Onwards and Upwards! And thanks so much for coming along for the ride.

(Note: the original post said third birthday, which happened for two reasons: there was an earlier Blogspot version of this blog, and there has been much discussion this week about whether the roof was repaired two or three years ago, as it is leaking again, and I was writing this as we were dealing with the contractors. You know how it goes. Sorry about that.)

Making Love Possible

Special note: Spirits of Place, my little collection of flash fiction, is free today, if you’d like to get a copy. 

Valentine’s Day is the first true commercial holiday, since nothing romantic is associated with any of the Catholic saints bearing the name Valentine. Geoffrey Chaucer first wrote of it as a time when birds chose their mates, but even in England mid-February is an unlikely time for this to happen. Nonetheless, the tradition of sending adorned messages to a sweetheart began in the very late 18th century, and seemed to have arose naturally from local English customs. By the mid-19th century, it had spread to all of Europe and the Americas. Mass-produced cards became common, and various retail industries jumped on the bandwagon to hawk their candy, flowers, jewelry, and sentimental gifts. If you’ve decluttered, there’s no doubt some of the Valentine’s Day stuff you’ve received over the years is no longer around, right?

Gifts of experience are the Minimalist recommendation, and posts and comments by Jenny at Ex-Consumer and Robert at Untitled Minimalism are worth the chuckles (I will never get past the mental picture of Robert as a teddy bear singing “Teddy Bear”). There have also been several posts by mothers astounded at what’s involved in their childrens’ classroom Valentine’s Day activities, where commercialism runs as rampant as ever.

Love, however, needs room–not stuff–to grow. Love of any kind takes up a lot of space in our hearts and minds. We can feel that our love for someone, whether spouse, child, friend, parent, or mankind in general, is boundless, but the nasty truth is that the Read more »

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