In her journals, May Sarton writes extensively about her love of "order and beauty" and all the ways she works to stay on top of clutter, piles of mail, and flowers, flowers, flowers.  This is but one of the many topics about which she writes that make me feel as if she were reaching out from the pages of her books directly into my mind, reading my thoughts with such accuracy it is almost eerie.

I returned from my latest journey away from home this past Sunday, and yesterday morning I came downstairs feeling a fierce need to have one of my not-at-all-infrequent purge-fests.  I spent the entire day filling bags and boxes of donations, re-organizing my inventory of books, throwing away, shredding, storing, clearing out files and hauling trash.  I am actually sore today from all the running around, but as always, feel absolutely giddy over the fact that I have very tangibly lightened our load.

This is my neurosis – the most powerful OCD part of my brain that cannot cope with the idea of having too much stuff.  You know when the best time to be around our house is?  When we move, as we are prone to giving away as much as humanly possible – furniture, linens, kitchen appliances.  I would not be surprised if one day we handed over the keys to a perfectly good car.  Giving things away is one of my passions, and one of my proudest achievements is showing my husband the thrill of passing our worldly goods along to someone else who can use them.  During one of our many moves these past few years, he was ready to haul everything we no longer needed to the dump, but I insisted we take three full truckloads to the Salvation Army, where he was astounded to see that many of the things we dropped off with one load were already gone by the time we came back with another load.

This drive in me came from an experience with someone I used to know, someone whose obsession with obtaining and amassing material possessions had grown to such an extent that I could not help but feel the emptiness in this person's life as I stood amongst piles and piles and piles of things with nowhere to walk but a narrow path through the entire house.  I do not speak of this from a place of judgment, but of sadness, where I feel pity for someone so sorrowful inside that the outside must be filled with so much material distraction.

I have such a profound aversion to having anything that resembles any part of that in my life that I have developed a rather peculiar skill of x-ray vision into every nook and cranny in our home.  This is a wonderful gift to my marriage as my husband's most frequent questions begin with, "Where is…" or "I can't find…" or, my personal favorite, "Where did you hide….?"  I then proceed to tell him, and he goes to said drawer or cabinet, opens it, gives it a half glance, shuts it immediately and tells me I'm wrong.  When I walk over to my secret super spy hiding place and show him that – gasp – the item he was in search of was actually in the drawer but – gasp – under another item, he marvels over the fact that I remembered precisely where that week old half eaten bagel was.  I suppose this could easily be labeled "photographic memory", but I like to call it, "having to deal with the fact that I am married to my husband and without me to provide him with a treasure map of where things are, he might have to spend – gasp – more than five tenths of a millisecond looking for his glasses."  Perhaps a little more wordy than necessary but spot on nonetheless.

So that was my Monday and today I'm finishing up a few more odds and ends.  I have signed up for a writing class through UCLA Extension which starts tomorrow evening, and the main source of inspiration for giving my home another round of "getting rid of" is my wanting to set up a new writing space outside of my studio.  This journey into writing, where I am wanting to write more than I ever have, has had a surprisingly slow beginning, where I have to admit that maybe one of the reasons I spent an entire day clearing things out was to, in fact, avoid writing.  It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I have to acknowledge it as a possibility.  As much writing as I've done over the past couple of years, this still feels like a huge shift, and as far as I'm concerned these are a lot of very common modes of resistance.  The most important part of my work right now is to keep this resistance in check, to fight it every step of the way.

"Rule of thumb:  The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it."  -Steven Pressfield, The War of Art