Tag Archive | Marie Kondo

Good Neighbors

Jan31
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Grateful the Ecofan on top of the woodstove is working again…

Speaking of thanking things, I am so grateful to my little Ecofan that sits on top of the woodstove and pushes hot air through the house, using only the temperature differential between incoming air and the heat underneath it to power itself. It quit working about a week ago, and I fussed with it a little, talked to it some, looked up repair options on Youtube, and suddenly it started working again last night. I have been thanking it out loud when it’s blowing every time I add wood to the stove.

Another thing Marie Kondo did for me was validate my tendency to speak to everything. I’ve been chatting with houseplants all my life. If everything has some sort of spirit, it’s not crazy to speak to everything. I do it all the time, but almost never in front of anyone else. It’s one reason I live alone except for non-verbal animals. I feel really good about thanking the Ecofan.

I’m grateful for everything in my life, including the fact of where I live. Not only is it beautiful, it isn’t 50 degrees below zero tonight. It hasn’t been much below zero for twenty years. This winter, just a couple of nights in negative single digits. When I first moved here, there were multiple nights each winter in minus double digits, several each year of 20 or more below. When I lived in northeastern Utah in an 1880s two-room log cabin, we had five nights in a row around 40 below. I’d get the temperature up into the 90s and pack the woodstove before I went to bed. When I woke, it was 50 inside. I’m grateful I no longer have to work that hard to stay warm. I feel for those who do.

So while others in our great, big country struggle to survive this polar vortex spill caused by ‘global warming,’ or as I prefer to call it, Climate Chaos, I sit here at my desk cozy and content, appreciating where and among whom I live.

Even if I don’t agree with my neighbors about some things, there are a couple of things we all seem to have in common: We care about the landscape in which we dwell. We have some reverence for place, no matter how differently we manifest it. And we care about each others’ animals, feeding one another’s cats or filling birdfeeders when someone’s away, catching cows or horses that stray. The other day I went to water a friend’s plants and spooked a flock of rosy finches.

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Audubon has a fascinating map feature that shows how the range of gray-crowned rosy finches, listed as Climate Endangered, has diminished between 2000 and now. I’ve heard about these birds, increasingly uncommon winter residents in western Colorado, but never seen one until this flock last week. It was thrilling! An unintended benefit of being neighborly.

Another Life v. Death dilemma entered my life this week. A guy called, I recognized his name as a long-time local family who are outfitters. He said a mountain lion had gotten into his herd of horses down in the Smith Fork, and might have killed one of them. “Once they’ve done something like that they’ll do it again,” he explained. He wanted permission to track the lion across my property. I said, reluctantly, ok. I suspected he was exaggerating the alleged lion attack. But what else could I have done?

I said, “I would prefer that you don’t kill it on my property.” He had no reply. We hung up. My land is a recognized wildlife sanctuary. I can’t give just anyone permission to kill on it. But if livestock is at stake, and people are courteous enough to ask permission, I can’t very well say no. That is the unwritten code of where I live: We are neighborly. We try to help out each other. I have seen these guys putting chains on their tires and taking them off at the top of the field in the canyon where their horses are right now. They work hard. They are attentive to their animals. Their way is not mine, but I don’t begrudge them.

The next day, I ran into one of them. They were searching for two hunting dogs they’d lost track of whilst tracking. I called James that evening, and said “I’ll sleep better tonight knowing they’re home warm and safe, but if they’re not I’ll keep looking out for them.” They had been found, they were fine. I was relieved. He was grateful that I’d asked. Ultimately, they did not find the lion, but they did get all their hounds back. It was a good outcome, as far as I’m concerned.

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Later that day we ran into a traffic jam on our way to Delta.

 

img_5342Another highlight of the week was finding a new home for a sweet old cat. Which reminds me, people have asked for a Rosie the Dog update: It’s a long story, but Rosie is in a foster home in Ridgway where she gets to live in the house, and cross-country ski almost every day. She is available for permanent adoption through the Second Chance Humane Society. You can meet her here if you haven’t already:

Bringing Rosie into my life generated a big awakening. Her joyful, loving energy lifted my spirits immensely, just as my latest round of PT has strengthened and toned my body. The result has been an enlivening perspective on making the best of what already is in my life, and relinquishing all that I must in order to live mindfully within my limitations.

The biggest gift Rosie gave me was the realization that I was taking my own precious animals for granted. Despite having all along a painful awareness of the shortness and mystery of each of their lives, I wasn’t putting into practice that awareness. With four of them, and my limited energy and physical constraints, I wasn’t spending enough time loving each of them, one on one, eye to eye, heart to heart. Since the kittens came, the two old dogs have loyally done whatever I’ve asked of them, patiently savoring any morsel of my undivided attention as gratefully as they do the tiniest last bites they wait for at the end of every meal. 

Since Rosie left six weeks ago, I’ve engaged more with each dog and cat, and even had a session last week with an animal communicator. It was amazing and exhilarating. The understanding and bond with all of my animals is stronger, in both directions. The cats are both more affectionate, and coming on more and longer walks with me and the dogs. Raven has stopped licking her groins obsessively, and is much more relaxed. Stellar is even happier than he’s always been, and said he likes the pumpkin on his food.

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The cats are especially grateful that sweet Rosie has found a new place to live on her journey to a real home. Now they can walk with us through the woods or up the driveway, and come through the mudroom unchallenged. Ojo has stopped biting me, and started purring again.

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We haven’t been to the canyon since we snowshoed out there on New Year’s Day, taking our walks up the driveway instead. And there have been plenty of days this month when we didn’t even do that! We’re all getting lazy in our old age. Or maybe just more particular about what weather we want to go out and play in.

And then there are days like these: The sky remained cloudless all day. Late sun sliding below the ridge, lighting snowbanks, treebark, mountaintops, cats’ eyes, dogs’ fur, deep bright cold gold.

Air warmed to almost freezing from nine overnight. We went outside late morning. Dogs and deer have carved trails intersecting with paths I’ve shoveled, and I could get around the yard a little more for rounds. Under some trees ground has warmed enough to melt snow. It’s time to think about pruning some shrubs while they’re free of leaves. Dormant buds already pulse with life on fruit trees. I hear a chainsaw.

Stellar and I walk into the woods next door as neighbor Ken stops his saw. He’s clearing a dead tree for Paul’s firewood. He offers me a chair, a beautiful round from the dead juniper, and is happy for the break. We chat about this winter, the marvelous snow, our miracle girl next door, recent bobcats and mountain lions in the neighborhood. Paul pulls up in his 4-wheeler to collect the wood, and we catch up for a few minutes, while Ken plows him a track to the tree pieces. Stellar and I leave them to their wood work, and head happily home to our own.

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He really does want to help.

 

 

In Defense of Marie Kondo

Jan28
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Before the neighbor plowed my driveway, and below, after. Completely unrelated to Marie Kondo, but I don’t want to share pictures of all my STUFF! Hard to believe under all this snow that in just three or four weeks we’ll have flowers emerging again.

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When I first heard an interview about Marie Kondo on NPR, years ago, her very phrase “spark joy” sparked joy in me, then and there, as I drove along the highway. I remember exactly where on the road I was, just over that crest beyond Kwiki, where you can look down into the river, across the river, over the fields, to the mountains. There’s a pullout there. Just east of that pullout I heard the phrase spark joy for the first time. 

Marie Kondo is a Shinto priestess. Those who deride her approach to things, (gentle, respectful, connected, grateful) are the product of separation from the natural world enforced by the military-industrialist culture that pervades the globe. Transportation, weapons, communication, myriad insidious tendrils of technology wrap around this living planet like so much tangled fishing net, choking the life from her, drowning her in her own effluent as she is pumped dry and belched into a finite bubble of atmosphere. Only the scum of the earth would make a career out of destroying the planet, and so the scum rises to the upper echelons of corporate domination. 

But I digress. I felt the truth of Marie’s philosophy in my bones that day, and tingled inside my skin. It reflects the way I have always felt about things, from obviously animate things like Raggedy Ann and my stuffed animals, the orchids in my sunroom; to less obviously inspirited things like rocks, firewood, a brass pelican, appliances, toy plastic spiders, bubble wrap, even nail clippings. Growing up in this dominant “consumer” culture, I’ve had to unlearn the reverence for all things with which I was born. I resent being called a consumer. I consume as little as I can from this planet, and do my best to give back to it. 

I have a lot of stuff because most of it came to me, and I attached to it, and couldn’t pass it on through my life. My ancestors, parents (grandparents, great-grandparents) spent time in the Far East, as they called it, Japan, China, the Philippines, from the early days of US colonization well into my generation of cousins. I was raised among oriental antiques and taught the value of good things. Other than that, though, we were a throwaway family like everyone else. 

It’s taken a long time for me to even face, much less begin to unravel, the web of stuff that surrounds me. There are obviously enough people who suffer from their inability to organize stuff to make Marie Kondo a superstar. I’m one of them. Generations of things have reached a dead end in me. There is no one to inherit in my line. Generations of things, which I have because each piece speaks to me, holds an association, belongs to some story or person in my life. And/Or, because it’s functional, so why spend money on new materials? I’m a keeper.

But each thing connects to me with a cosmic invisible strand, enmeshes me in a culture of things as surely as the techno-web entangles the earth. Marie gives people like me hope. There is a way out, by cultivating discernment, and a better understanding of ourselves and our values, and learning some simple storage techniques. People embrace the KonMari method because it works.

It’s the age-old adage I was raised with, A place for everything, and everything in its place. It’s appreciating what you have, it is in fact, wanting what you have instead of getting what you want. Is this the fundamental objection some people have to the Konmari method? That they can’t continue to consume everything they want, if they even think about her approach? That they can’t stand to look inside themselves and feel and think about their belongings, and whether, maybe, they need to own so much stuff?

My friend Dawn has helped me with my stuff-culling struggle before, and was instrumental in helping me reduce my ancestral inheritance from one storage unit down to a quarter of a yurtful. Not long after I first heard about Marie, Dawn gave me her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. While I haven’t been able to commit to the process entirely, I have used its philosophy of respecting and thanking things that no longer serve, and its spark joy criterion to help me clear a bunch of stuff from my life. Every time I take a box or two to the thrift store I feel lighter. Every year I resolve to git‘er done once and for all. Maybe this year.

I am learning. For example, all my tea towels bring me joy, and when they age out of the kitchen, they go to work as animal wipes for wet coats, muddy feet, weed seeds. I enjoy every one of the cotton dishcloths I’ve knitted, and they last forever; when one finally gets too old it’s recycled into the tool box for a small work cloth, or into the rag bin for a scrubber. I finally have rag mentality: natural fiber clothing gets used long and hard for its initial purpose, and then it gets shredded into rags to use for cleaning, dusting, and eventually compost.

What Marie teaches is that if we value stuff more, we have less of it. It’s a lesson capitalist, consumer culture would do well to learn. It’s the lesson my friend Jerry knew forty years ago and I failed to grasp completely. I had more of that feeling living in an 8’x40’ trailer when I first landed here, with the bulk of my world outside that one long room, than I do now. More and more stuff accrued after the house was built, the bulky edifice in which I now dwell most of my waking hours instead of outside. Inside, surrounded by stuff, much of it inherited, which overwhelms me. 

I’m grateful to Marie Kondo and her method, which is grounded in a deep sense of spirit. Maybe someday I’ll have time and energy to tackle everything all in one month, but meanwhile I’ll just keep on decluttering one drawer, one bookshelf, one file drawer, one windowsill at a time. And still, I’ll have a full house; but everything in it will spark joy. Then I’ll finally have peace of mind. Right?

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