Day 4

The lightening continues as I graze through my house, getting rid of one thing after another in no particular order and without the intention of accomplishing anything.

I’m learning a bit about myself as I go through the various places where I stash things. Mostly, I understand that it has never been my intention to have a Spartan environment. Generally, I have the propensity to not throw things away, thinking that someday that I will be able to reuse them again.

And sometimes, it’s just easier to put stuff in a pile than figure out what to do with it.

That concept, shelving things until I know what to do, has some similarities to how I deal with some life experiences. Which brings me back to that place of intentionality. What is it about our modern day values that makes it easier to shrug things off than applying ourselves to dealing with them?

I spend the morning reading about mysticism and in my perusal I read about Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman who kept a journal for the last two years on her life before her death at Auschwitz in 1945. It was recently published as “A Life Interrupted.” In the article, published at http://home.wxs.nl/~brouw724/EttyHillesum.html, Hillesum is described as reaching through her obstacles, both personal and societal, to find a universality of life and a connection to the divine. Through her struggles and her “knowledge” that there wasn’t much time left for her, she reaches a point where she can connect to beauty and a sense of oneness with the world and its beings and becomes transformed.

Transformation is partly the reason that I try to be intentional about removing 27 things a day. But even then I miss a day here and there, and I can’t help but think it is a mighty shallow discipline in light of life and death realities.

Science is telling us that we all have the ability to shift our consciousness and be a part of the transformation of the world. I attempt to do a small part by sorting through my life and its clutter to find a clear space to rest. But even as I take these steps, I have a critical eye that somehow I should be doing it differently.

Perhaps when the extraneous stuff is out of my house, I can concentrate on getting rid of the behavioral patterns that don’t serve me in these truly troubled times.