I posted this photo of myself to FB a couple of years ago. It reflected where I was at that moment in time.
An elderly (yes! elderly!!!) white woman, in want of a hair cut (covid!), feeling tired, dealing with…too much and barely hanging on by a thread.
Since that time things have gotten even ‘worse’ with a severe shingles outbreak and continuing deterioration of my body.
My spirit is wrestling with my physical and that can be exhausting at times. Because there are things I would still like to do, things I would like to accomplish, so many things! And my body has finally put it’s foot down (how appropriate given the pain I feel on a daily basis is in my right foot/leg/hip) and is loudly saying NO!
Talking to others in my age bracket, we are all dealing with the same (ok, I’ll use it) shit.
We are looking at a life that has been long and fulfilling in so many ways. An accumulation of stuff to the point where it has become overwhelming and trying to re-home as much of it as we can.
But, it’s *our* stuff, not someone else’s. It’s *our* ‘treasure’ (my precioussssssss) not someone else’s. It’s *our* memories of *our* life, not someone else’s.
In the end I opted to not even open some of the binders I pulled off the shelves, just tossed them. Paper into paper recycling (newsletters), plastic into plastic recycling, metal into metal recycling.
Some things, like the hundreds and hundreds of slides went straight into the garbage.
The sample collections – now consisting of 1.5 ‘large’ boxes will be brought to Vancouver when we go down the end of September and handed over to two younger weavers. If they keep them or not will not be any part of my life once they are handed over. They may find them dated (they are) and not of much use (they may not be) and perhaps they will pass on or toss. I don’t know. Once they leave my hands, I don’t care what they do with them.
In the end, I managed to clear several shelves of a significant amount of feet of shelving space, enough that I *might* be able to shelve all the books I routinely use that currently don’t fit in my library. But that is to be determined. Just moving the binders I want to keep to my library in the studio (from my office) took up one of the now empty shelves there.
My emotional attachment to these years of information collecting was high and it pained me to even consider throwing things away. But I had to be realistic. How much value was in those binders? How out of date was it? Who on earth would want it?
I can now see my desk again because I managed to clear enough space off my office shelves to make a home for the shipping stuff (customs forms, padded envelopes, shipping labels, shipping tape).
So I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot, even though it doesn’t actually look like much. Most of the work was in snipping the emotional attachment to my ‘precious’ books/binders/collected information. Things that, in many cases, I had not opened in decades. If they were that unused, how useful to me were they? Obviously, not much!
And in the doing? I found things that I had ‘lost’, which I DO still want/need and will use – in my next class for SOS, in fact.
So there is that.
In the meantime, I keep weaving, because I can. For now. I’m in my 70s, with a body that is breaking down. Who knows how long I will be able to do that?