The World Is My Sofa, part 1.
Thru the bog and fog and lack of snogs of the all the Goddamn Fucking Shit In The World, I appear to have overlooked a simple solution to apply to the comparatively undetectable crises on the lower strata where Your Humble Narrator stomps on bugs. Well, perhaps not a solution, but an alternate method to the madness of survival on the surface of this post-modern, industrial-military, certainly-a-planet piece of dirt.
Up until now, I've been working on the assumption that I would either continue with Neckwoods as my base of operations, or not at all; that is, I wasn't looking past the option of relocating, due to an abhorrent dislike of the cycle of packing/unpacking, folding/unfolding, building/deconstructing, lifting/toting, and storing/displaying that we subject our belongings to. Never mind the bloody brain hemmorhage of renting/borrowing a motor vehicle with sufficient carrying capacity to offload said belongings.
But then, that's it, isn't it? What keeps us grounded to one place if it isn't our stuff? We don't hate moving, we just hate moving our stuff. We hate emptying rooms we spent so long filling, we hate the fear of breakage, theft, or loss, we hate rearranging, we hate new patterns, we hate not having a place for everything. The solution, in part, is to part with as much stuff as possible, to separate yourself from the want that preceded your acquiring the stuff in the first place, the want that the Buddha says is the root of earthly suffering.
As Buddhist as I've tried to be in this aspect, I still have a whole lot of stuff at Neckwoods, altho not nearly as much as before and in fewer, more specific categories, mostly of the distraction type; music, books, etc. What if I could finally let go of the most tenacious of my stuff, the stuff with the most nostalgia attached to it, the most history, the heaviest psychic fingerprints? Half of The Concrete Standard can fit inside of Jones, and the other half I never listen to anyway. Half of my books are paperbacks that will never go out of print, the other half are bound to be available in paperback sooner or later, and the one percent that I count as collector's items I can fit into, as I learned the hard way, a small box. I've worn the same combination of "nice" clothes to work three times in a week without comment(not surprising, as all the pieces are black), I never wear half of the joke shirts I've collected out of sheer fear of destroying them with my acidic sebum, and everything else is moldering away as I patiently(and maybe futilely) shed the excess mass in order to fit into them again.
What if I could live like Lo-Lo, who hops from one shared housing situation to another, only keeping enuf stuff to keep her functional on a basic level(the only real piece of furniture that goes everywhere she does is her four-poster bed, which I've had the pleasure of disassembling and reassembling several times); being able to pack it all up should the circumstances warrant it with a minimum of fuss. What if "coming home" wasn't as important at the end of the day as it appears to be now, what if I could relocate the comfort of that act to something else, something just as rewarding without having to attach a location to it? What if "home" could be as innocuous and fluid as "work?"
It reminds me of what butterbee expressed here; some of us make a choice not to put down roots. Maybe some of us aren't meant to.
=]'
Up until now, I've been working on the assumption that I would either continue with Neckwoods as my base of operations, or not at all; that is, I wasn't looking past the option of relocating, due to an abhorrent dislike of the cycle of packing/unpacking, folding/unfolding, building/deconstructing, lifting/toting, and storing/displaying that we subject our belongings to. Never mind the bloody brain hemmorhage of renting/borrowing a motor vehicle with sufficient carrying capacity to offload said belongings.
But then, that's it, isn't it? What keeps us grounded to one place if it isn't our stuff? We don't hate moving, we just hate moving our stuff. We hate emptying rooms we spent so long filling, we hate the fear of breakage, theft, or loss, we hate rearranging, we hate new patterns, we hate not having a place for everything. The solution, in part, is to part with as much stuff as possible, to separate yourself from the want that preceded your acquiring the stuff in the first place, the want that the Buddha says is the root of earthly suffering.
As Buddhist as I've tried to be in this aspect, I still have a whole lot of stuff at Neckwoods, altho not nearly as much as before and in fewer, more specific categories, mostly of the distraction type; music, books, etc. What if I could finally let go of the most tenacious of my stuff, the stuff with the most nostalgia attached to it, the most history, the heaviest psychic fingerprints? Half of The Concrete Standard can fit inside of Jones, and the other half I never listen to anyway. Half of my books are paperbacks that will never go out of print, the other half are bound to be available in paperback sooner or later, and the one percent that I count as collector's items I can fit into, as I learned the hard way, a small box. I've worn the same combination of "nice" clothes to work three times in a week without comment(not surprising, as all the pieces are black), I never wear half of the joke shirts I've collected out of sheer fear of destroying them with my acidic sebum, and everything else is moldering away as I patiently(and maybe futilely) shed the excess mass in order to fit into them again.
What if I could live like Lo-Lo, who hops from one shared housing situation to another, only keeping enuf stuff to keep her functional on a basic level(the only real piece of furniture that goes everywhere she does is her four-poster bed, which I've had the pleasure of disassembling and reassembling several times); being able to pack it all up should the circumstances warrant it with a minimum of fuss. What if "coming home" wasn't as important at the end of the day as it appears to be now, what if I could relocate the comfort of that act to something else, something just as rewarding without having to attach a location to it? What if "home" could be as innocuous and fluid as "work?"
It reminds me of what butterbee expressed here; some of us make a choice not to put down roots. Maybe some of us aren't meant to.
=]'