The Most Toys

Having moved around quite a bit throughout my life and specifically three times this year, I have a rather unique perspective on the different cultures I’ve meandered through.  While most of my moves where within the US, the last two were outside the country where I was born and I’m learning new things every day.

For instance, the stuff you can find in America is simply not available in other countries.  You may find something similar, or you may pay an arm and a leg for the same thing shipping through two countries, but it’s not available at any of the local stores.  We’ve bumped up against this a few times over the past year, but most recently it was Chocolate Chips.  Today I went hunting for largish bag of baking soda.  Nope.  Just 250 g sized.  I’m finding that large quantities of things are available IF you have a wholesale license, otherwise, you have to buy whatever size/sort it’s been packaged in.  It’s not the prices I’m whining about, it’s the quantities.

Here’s another American sort of example of “excess”.  We were watching Master-chef (because we are cooking show addicts) and all of us sat in silence while they toss and broke one plate after another in the garbage bin.  Why?  Because the eggs on each plate weren’t perfect.  They used the crashing plates to mess with the contestants heads, but also to show that they had the budget to just throw things away.  My D said “they are just breaking them…” with a sound of despair in her voice. (she’s always loved dish-ware), while the rest of us just sat here and nodded numbly.

You see, we’ve become more sensitive to waste.  This past year has been about letting go.  We let go of our country, we let go of another country, we let go of our cars, our RV, all our household goods, and a lot of the people we’d spent years getting to know.  And with each item, thing, person that left our world, the bowl (esoterically speaking) that we carried became emptier and emptier, till we understood just how much stuff we had piled into them to fill the void inside ourselves.

To be honest, it was very painful.  Not the letting go, that was almost freeing.  To feel the weight of accumulated items with all their emotional baggage go to the wayside (or into other people’s cars, the local giveaway shop etc.) was liberating.  However, to feel the emptiness that was hiding underneath all those collected items wasn’t as much fun :/.

Slowly, very slowly we’ve selected just what is really important.  What are our needs?  Which wants are really necessary, and which ones are just things we just think we need.

Lately, I find myself sitting in a single chair in the kitchen.  Do I need a desk?,  A living room suite?, a television viewing space?, a dining room? (we have a kitchen table).  How much space do we really need?  And what do we do with the space we have?

All of those ideas have to be sorted out.  What we’ve been taught, living in the part of the world where “he who has the most toys” wins is the overriding belief system,  has to be flushed out and rebuilt.

And it’s not easy. We’re addicted to stuff.  We crave the things we used to have or used to be able to get and feel an imbalanced longing for those objects to sooth the hole that was there all along.

One of the more positive things I’ve regained are my words.  They were there, buried under all my toys, my distractions, the objects of my desire.  Writing is feeding me.  It’s filling up the empty holes inside in a way I never expected.  All I had to do was let go of my toys…

Sometimes you just need to start

I’ve had the intuitive awareness for some time now to start a blog about what’s going on both in my own world and in the world at large.  Many times those two concepts overlap 🙂  In the last year I have lived in three (3) countries.  The USA, Canada, and most recently, Ireland.  To say that this has affected my understanding of life is a very large understatement.  I’m still trying to figure out where all the pieces go.  If you can imagine that every box you pack is another aspect of yourself, then unpacking them is a process of figuring out “where they go now”.  Fathoming what goes where in a new country can be a Herculean effort.  I have my shovel, now where did that barn go?

Another thing that keeps going through my mind is the wise words of a very old friend.  “You can have everything you want, you just can’t have it all at once”.
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This year has been an exercise in receiving everything I asked for in some very interesting packages, in three different countries.

I sometimes “receive” images in my mind when I ask my upline for information (more on that in another post).  I see a picture of someone sitting on a floor with all my requests in picture images sitting around them in piles.  The piles are places as far as I can tell, perhaps “areas” that my dreams can manifest.  Then they take these “puzzle” pieces and try to find a place to place them.  And then I wonder to myself.  What came first?  The fact that I was going to move or the fact that I was going to “have to” move to have all my requests fulfilled.  Then I get that old saying in my head “be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it”.  ;)!

I’ve always loved hiking, walking, rambling through natural habitats and those that humans inhabit as well.  Deep down inside I consider myself a sociologist (with life training,
not schooling).  What makes us all tick?  What cultural things affect us? Why DO we DO what we DO?  And while I walk, I ponder.  This blog will reflect, well, my reflections, as well as my daily activities,whatever they happen to be.