Woke up this morning feeling a bit displaced. Looked along the ceiling of the Hobo Dojo, at all the strange air-conditioners and light fixtures and outcroppings of cabinet - and longed for a proper home. Rain is on the way again, and I have no shed or garage or patio cover. No place for the keeping of a few heirlooms, or extra conveniences that I have just because. No, my living arrangement has been carved down again and again till I just dont have the room even for the small amount of stuff I have. So this week, I have to cut it all back again. Anything that I can not currently use simply has to go. I have a panicky feeling when I think about how easy it is to get cluttered again in such a small space. So each morning I wake up and make the bed and fold and stow and stack and tidy. You really have to stay right on top of it, or you will find a corner in which to dump the unclassified things. And that will fill, and another corner will too, until the random useless detritus of daily life takes over. I cant go there. I HAVE to rid myself of all the boxes of stuff currently jumbled in my soft-sided garage that is still in Kagel Canyon. I have to build yet another shed at the new place, and strictly limit myself to what can fit inside it in an orderly fashion. Ill be headed up there today to begin the culling process. The going-through of a dozen or more boxes that have been moved from place to place, because Im too lazy and scared to find out what is in each of them; to trip the emotional land-mines in each and face the regrets and dark nostalgia. Ill take a chair and a radio and just force myself to throw away the old letters and toys my kids once played with and parts of cars long gone and notebooks full of plans that never made it off the page. Today I will fill a couple of large garbage bags and toss them in a dumpster somewhere, and call the task begun. This is how I see it: We all have to live with the decisions we have made. I never wanted a home badly enough to focus on building and maintaining one. I never wanted stable family-life so much that I would go all in, and accept that the cost would be my freedom. I never fully caught the rhythm of easy back and forth. The cheerful Hokey Pokey dance of never-ending compromise out of which great relationships emerge almost by accident. And so I find myself with a life that is - by appearances - very very small. Yet, I feel that the more inward parts of me - the self that doesnt attach to its artifacts - is ready to expand outward and redefine the game. But Im high in a bottleneck pass. I cant go back, and I cant haul my baggage through the narrows ahead and out into the open sky. When we were young smugglers, we would turn to one another and quote Frank Herbert: Fear is the mind-killer. Its as true now as ever, The fear that I will someday terribly miss things that I am now too afraid to look at? How is that for the killing of mind? I WILL cut it back. I WILL build a shed and a modest deck, and live in a nest rather than a burrow. And I WILL get my heart and head into the present and throw some songs and stories into the future.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 17:59:59 +0000
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