I know who I am. I am not perfect. I'm
not the most beautiful woman in the world. But I'm one of them. -Mary J. Blige
How many of us are burdened with
'stuff' we will never use again? How
many of have collected 'stuff' intellectually, emotionally and spiritually,
that keeps us in way too much busyness?
All of us require some simpleness in our lives, during this
speed-of-light technological world we live in.
Life starts to slow us down, physically, and all we can do is keep our
minds sharp, our emotions true, and our soul as authentic as it was meant to
be. As we age, we begin to reflect on
our lives, our meanings, our purposes.
The older we quiet, the more sedentary our ives may become, we have more
time on our hands and we get to do and think and feel and believe whatever we
are, at the very core of our identity.
Our mornings are taken in more
slowly. We listen more to things we had
no time to listen to before. We draw
closer to nature, to our little plots or balconies of garden plots and pots. We feel life's whispers. We feel the whispers. We hear the ether's whispers. The more we simplify our lives, the better
able we are to hear the important things.
It is easier to have gratitude
when you have less to overwhelm your gratitude.
In the old days, everything that came in had an important purpose;
sometimes a life-saving purpose. Today,
we collect and store and packrat things we may not even remember we have until
we do some deep-cleaning ( artists beware!...lol). We have forgotten about repurposing. Mother spoke of flour sacks, sugar sack, and
dresses made of that material. Living
simply allows for more time to do for and with others because we are not so
busy dusting between nicknacks, for instance.
Spending time in utter silence,
for me, doing art, is the most silence I have in my life. It is the silence within. It restores me. It gives me time to think purposeful
thoughts. It gives me time to listen,
truly listen, to the sounds around me.
Summer is the time that I do my art outside in the gazebo and it is the
time I get to listen to the resident toad, the crickets, the baby birds, and
lately, the longing caw of rasping crows.
How often do we hear, I am too busy to think?
Simplifying life means we have
time to really remember things, not just the hurry, worry, flurry of negative
things, but the best of things. These
last few days I have been sorting through my DNA connections ( my paternal
family found me a month or so ago and I am connecting and hearing stories of my
father and his life and the connection with my mother. I just heard something that sorts out another
bit of my past and why I might feel and, yes, hear, some things. I was told that, when my father came to take
me away from my mother, when I was a few months old, that I was hidden in the
back of a dark closet, under a blanket.
This has really impacted me. I
know now why I have always felt uncomfortable being in confined spaces, and in
having my head covered over. Primal
wounding would explain that, for I am not afraid of much like that. I have had need of some silent time to really
work through that. It was hugely
impacting. Is it why I have always had
to have some background noise when I am lying in the dark? It is not haunting, nor negative, it is
simply another piece of the puzzle of who I am?
Do we have simple time to really consider who and why we are who we
are? Some memories are worth digging up
to be sure. And, we can only do this by
living more simply and less crammed life.
When we are not too busy being
busy, we have time to live determined, flexible, open lives. Our calendar filled with scrawls of
appointments and things to do does not allow for time to be Present to those in
our everyday life. When we are rushing just
to rush, we miss doing things that give you a new world view, a new community
view, a new personal view and sitting with that for a time. Were we too busy, keep ourselves too busy, to
really become who we were meant to be?
As we age, I think we have a sense
of regrets, and this might be because our life was so cluttered. We find we have time. Time is of the essence and does not need to
be filled with furfural. We have a sense
of needing to fill our time with important things beyond the physical and
intellectual, really, we are in the age and stage of deepening our emotional
maturity and spirituality. Memories are
not hard to carry when you simplify what we are doing. It is a time to reconnect with things,
people, places, that we might have neglected in our life.
To me, I find that the least busy,
most simple time of life was when I was around eight to ten years of age; a time of riding my horse all day, a time of
blue jeans and barefeet, a time of no childhood need, no teenaged angst, no
adult busyness, and something my soul longs for. So, this is why I chose to do an illustration
of a blue-jeanned girl. When was the
most simple time of your life? What represents Simplicity to you? Can you
express that in your art journal, or your painting, or your poem, or your
thoughts today?
©Carol Desjarlais 9.14.19
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