Kimberly Steele (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kimberlysteele) wrote2024-03-04 09:46 pm
kimberlysteele) wrote2024-03-04 09:46 pm
Entry tags:
The Lesson of Sensitivity: Adventures in Sacred Homemaking
An estate sale. This person has (had?) some nice stuff, mainly Southwestern in theme.
The goddess of love herself, Aphrodite, does not love everyone and everything. When mated to the god Hephaestus via the will of Zeus, Aphrodite is unfaithful to her husband with one who is more her choice, Ares. Her passionate affair with the stunningly beautiful Ares serves as a welcome end to her mismatched pairing with the crippled, ugly god of blacksmiths.
The story of Aphrodite and her failed first marriage is a lesson in saying No. The legend whispers in our ear, “You don’t have time to do the things you do not love or are being coerced into loving, and furthermore, you don’t even have time to attune yourself to them.” The previous statement illustrates why it is so wrong to settle in a relationship or to marry for finances or convenience: the one who settles (let’s call her the Settler) ends up over-sensitizing herself to the wrong person in an act of bad faith. Inevitably, there is a part of the Settler that ends up hating her mate because the Settled-for can never measure up to the ideal the Settler truly desires.
How Not to Achieve Your Dream Career
When I was younger, I suffered the common delusions of both wanting it all and thinking I could have it. My truest desire as a young person was to become a famous singer-songwriter. When I finished music college, I thought that dream life would fall into my lap. Meanwhile, I worked as a music teacher in several music lesson stores while performing small venues on the weekends, hoping to be discovered. I was easily and hopelessly distracted by various shiny carrots dangled in my general direction. I contemplated going back to school for a more secure job teaching in the schools. I tried to learn about real estate. I started writing novels. I dabbled in everything but I was best at spreading myself too thin.
By far, one of my worst mistakes was getting involved with my local teacher’s association. Flattered because I was sought as an expert, I became involved as a judge in my chapter’s music tests for children ages K-12. Judge duties grew into an appointment as administrator of an exam that saw hundreds of pressure cooker music students flowing through facilities which it was my job to procure, with teachers it was my job to recruit and organize as volunteers, with tests it was my job to get printed. This extremely demanding, often 40 hour a week job (on top of my make-a-living job) was 100 percent uncompensated. To make matters worse, there were a few bad apple teachers who were used to gaming the system. Though the agreement was that by entering students, you would be donating a set amount of hours per student in volunteer time, the richest and most entitled teachers acted exactly as you would expect. They would enter two dozen or so students and then conveniently disappear on luxury vacations when it came time to volunteer for test duties. One chronic vacationer had the gall to call me and leave an angry tirade about how awful I was to expect her to honor the agreement and keep her students out of the test as she would not be there to perform any duties. How dare I spoil her jet plane vacation with her rich husband! I wasted years of my young life on these people... I had my fill. I abdicated the administrative position and quit the organization permanently. By the time I ended my stint as test administrator, I had lost the motivation and desire to perform my own music in public as a career. Perhaps it was a mercy killing: my music never appealed to an audience larger than a few souls scattered across the globe anyway. Either way, I am glad things went the way they did, but if my goal was to become a singer-songwriter, I did a lousy job of achieving that goal. I attuned myself to goals outside of singing and songwriting and was burned out of my potential vocation by my own distraction and by allowing myself to be used up by jerks.
When I was younger, I suffered the common delusions of both wanting it all and thinking I could have it. My truest desire as a young person was to become a famous singer-songwriter. When I finished music college, I thought that dream life would fall into my lap. Meanwhile, I worked as a music teacher in several music lesson stores while performing small venues on the weekends, hoping to be discovered. I was easily and hopelessly distracted by various shiny carrots dangled in my general direction. I contemplated going back to school for a more secure job teaching in the schools. I tried to learn about real estate. I started writing novels. I dabbled in everything but I was best at spreading myself too thin.
By far, one of my worst mistakes was getting involved with my local teacher’s association. Flattered because I was sought as an expert, I became involved as a judge in my chapter’s music tests for children ages K-12. Judge duties grew into an appointment as administrator of an exam that saw hundreds of pressure cooker music students flowing through facilities which it was my job to procure, with teachers it was my job to recruit and organize as volunteers, with tests it was my job to get printed. This extremely demanding, often 40 hour a week job (on top of my make-a-living job) was 100 percent uncompensated. To make matters worse, there were a few bad apple teachers who were used to gaming the system. Though the agreement was that by entering students, you would be donating a set amount of hours per student in volunteer time, the richest and most entitled teachers acted exactly as you would expect. They would enter two dozen or so students and then conveniently disappear on luxury vacations when it came time to volunteer for test duties. One chronic vacationer had the gall to call me and leave an angry tirade about how awful I was to expect her to honor the agreement and keep her students out of the test as she would not be there to perform any duties. How dare I spoil her jet plane vacation with her rich husband! I wasted years of my young life on these people... I had my fill. I abdicated the administrative position and quit the organization permanently. By the time I ended my stint as test administrator, I had lost the motivation and desire to perform my own music in public as a career. Perhaps it was a mercy killing: my music never appealed to an audience larger than a few souls scattered across the globe anyway. Either way, I am glad things went the way they did, but if my goal was to become a singer-songwriter, I did a lousy job of achieving that goal. I attuned myself to goals outside of singing and songwriting and was burned out of my potential vocation by my own distraction and by allowing myself to be used up by jerks.
Hypocrisy!
Back to gods: they don’t seem pleased with us humans when we pretend to be attuned to a noble cause and then proceed to show ourselves as the opposite of the ideals we preach. If mates of many years become a great deal like each other (regardless of passion or its absence) and if young music teachers become seasoned professional music teachers from spending years in the field, it follows that a self-proclaimed activist would become virtuous by the virtue of dedicating her time to activism. But what if there is no virtue in the activism? When vegans who proclaim all animals deserve mercy and then turn around with a merciless attitude towards other humans, who are only animals after all, the only force being sympathized with is arrogance. When the racial equality advocate tosses a pipe bomb into the local dollar store as her fellow advocates burn, loot, and vandalize the rest of the neighborhood, she is clearly not acting in the interests of the non-white people she claims to be championing. Non-white people were the ones shopping at Dollar General... Doing absolutely nothing is vastly preferable to acting as a hypocrite and then preening like a do-gooder. When the overbearing religious zealot tires the ears of anyone within shouting distance with his threats that you must either trust in Jesus or burn in hell, he is a great deal more like the devils in hell than he is like Jesus. Practice what you preach is the lesson. To become sympathetic to virtue, acting genuinely virtuous at every opportunity, even when these opportunities come with guaranteed pain, is the bottom line.
Back to gods: they don’t seem pleased with us humans when we pretend to be attuned to a noble cause and then proceed to show ourselves as the opposite of the ideals we preach. If mates of many years become a great deal like each other (regardless of passion or its absence) and if young music teachers become seasoned professional music teachers from spending years in the field, it follows that a self-proclaimed activist would become virtuous by the virtue of dedicating her time to activism. But what if there is no virtue in the activism? When vegans who proclaim all animals deserve mercy and then turn around with a merciless attitude towards other humans, who are only animals after all, the only force being sympathized with is arrogance. When the racial equality advocate tosses a pipe bomb into the local dollar store as her fellow advocates burn, loot, and vandalize the rest of the neighborhood, she is clearly not acting in the interests of the non-white people she claims to be championing. Non-white people were the ones shopping at Dollar General... Doing absolutely nothing is vastly preferable to acting as a hypocrite and then preening like a do-gooder. When the overbearing religious zealot tires the ears of anyone within shouting distance with his threats that you must either trust in Jesus or burn in hell, he is a great deal more like the devils in hell than he is like Jesus. Practice what you preach is the lesson. To become sympathetic to virtue, acting genuinely virtuous at every opportunity, even when these opportunities come with guaranteed pain, is the bottom line.
To this day, I have a large collection of stuff I don’t use. For instance, I have all the supplies with which to make soap, but I’ve never gotten around to making soap. The supplies are about 15 years old. I have a box of old silverware that I used to use when I hosted potlucks. It has been sitting around for about five years.
Most of us have extra stuff, from food we’ll never eat in our cupboards and refrigerators to extreme cases of entire unused houses. Our stuff absolutely owns us. We become the extra pair of shoes that should have been thrown away years ago. We resemble our own motley collection of small flower pots. I am partially the flatware that sits unused in my office. Its potential usefulness to someone else and the privilege of owning it are part of my karma, that is to say, my causes and my effects. The "cause" of the silverware being accumulated is now done and its energy is inert. It sits unused in my office. It needs to move on, and whether it ends up being used for someone's meals or melted down for the steel, the sensible thing for me to do is to donate it.
What (Are You On About) Now, Kimberly Steele?
The exercise is to get rid of five items you no longer use. Certain rules apply: you have to let go of the item, no hiding it away or loaning it. It has got to go somewhere where it will be used or at least thrown out. The key to the exercise is to get rid of the item with sincere intention that it will not be replaced by something that will become equally useless. When you throw or give the item away, acknowledge it and thank it for how it helped you in your life. Send it away with your blessing.
For instance, by the end of this week, I will practice what I preach and get rid of five things.
1. I will get rid of a framed print I have had nearly 10 years -- I don't think it is lucky for me. I also have a tiny house without adequate wall space.
2. The second thing I will get rid of is the old cornmeal I have stored in my cabinet. It is years old and cornmeal does not tend to last that long.
3. The third thing I will get rid of is that goofy flatware. If I cannot sell it, I will give it away.
4. The fourth thing I will get rid of is some epoxy resin I bought to make a craft memorial for my cat Kiki when she died. When I bought it, clearly I temporarily forgot how badly I suck at crafts. I will get a proper memorial made (by someone else) and give the resin to someone who is good at crafts.
5. The fifth thing I will get rid of is my hand blender. I do not use it anywhere near enough to justify owning it, and if I ever find myself needing a hand blender, I will get another one from GoodWill.
What five things will you get rid of? How soon will you get rid of them?
Things in which I did invest
I send you away, may you be blessed
Go to a place where you’ll be found
Or circle the right way around
To freedom, rest, and rebirth
Adored by those who know your worth
As I align myself more perfectly
And strip away all that isn’t me
I send you away, may you be blessed
Go to a place where you’ll be found
Or circle the right way around
To freedom, rest, and rebirth
Adored by those who know your worth
As I align myself more perfectly
And strip away all that isn’t me
no subject
(Anonymous) 2024-03-06 12:41 am (UTC)(link)And it's not just my stuff. I live in the house I grew up in. My late parents also belonged to the club. Especially my dad who lived through the Great Depression and hoarded anything potentially useful. He was a ham radio enthusiast, and his old equipment is still down in his workshop along with old vacuum tubes, jars of nails and pieces of wood for projects that never materialized.
As my grandmother ran a shoe repair shop for many years, some of her stuff got collected by my father as 'potentially useful'. There's an old granny rocker, with a cracked seat as the wood has dried out quite a bit. There's the battered old sewing machine for shoes (treadled operated) and a cast iron form for repairing shoes which feels like it weighs forty pounds at least. Enough of this stuff is old enough so I think a local auction house will be interested in it (along with the radio equipment) and I will finally get rid of it.
Part of the problem, I think, is the sentimental value of some of the stuff. But some of it seems to cling to you like plastic wrap even though it has no real value to you. And then there's that nagging little thought...'I might need that someday'....
JLfromNH
no subject
My father got rid of lots of stuff while he was alive but there is still a ton to deal with. An entire collection of figurines and steins. About 40 wool hats. A giant pool table that has not been used in thirty years, and as far as being used regularly, make it forty. I don't know that I can give away the pool table for free. It is very, very nice, but the damn thing is so heavy and large, it would be easier to move an antique concert grand piano. And of course it is in an inconvenient place: the basement. His workshop is also still down there, and I miss him viscerally every time I am down there because I cannot bring myself to change it. Visually, it maintains a bit of the illusion/delusion that he is still around. The combination of sentimental and "I might need it" is devastating.
no subject
Grew up in a hoarder house, and have been fighting that fight all my adult life.
no subject
Get rid!
(Anonymous) 2024-03-06 06:41 pm (UTC)(link)For many years I thought of myself as redeeming things from being wasted. Waste in general just makes me sad, and the word "consumer" really rubs me the wrong way. The amount of junk I've been able to repurpose is kind of astonishing, even extending to an old 20 acre homestead with antique buildings including a gambrel roof barn.
But, having had to clear thru my Dad's stuff more than once in the last couple of years to pare his junk down to manageable size (3 moves), it's becoming much clearer to me that I need to repurpose much of my own junk by giving stuff away to someone who may actually use it, and certain things just need to be relocated to the landfill or recycle center.
Every once and a while my daughter and I watch a couple of episodes of "Hoarders" (that's about all we can stand) and the next day I feel compelled to fill the garbage and recycle to the top with something-anything!
It's amazing how the poor (I mean afflicted, not impoverished) people in that program can value a worn sippy-cup from their child's baby-hood more than the person that the child grew into. I'm taking steps not to turn into THAT person.
Davie
Re: Get rid!
"It's amazing how the poor (I mean afflicted, not impoverished) people in that program can value a worn sippy-cup from their child's baby-hood more than the person that the child grew into. I'm taking steps not to turn into THAT person." That is a haunting observation. I need to keep reminding myself that my father is not the tools he left behind. He is not a house and he is not a lawnmower. The only way I can keep him around in any capacity is to act like he did: diligent, generous, and kind.
Re: Get rid!
Stuff
(Anonymous) 2024-03-06 11:00 pm (UTC)(link)We got rid of most of our stuff. We wanted to get out of our still locked-down city and our stuff was making it difficult to think how we could possibly leave. It would have been very expensive to move it all. A bit we kept, some we gave to friends, some we sold, and some we gave to charity.
One of the things we did turned out to be really emotionally satisfying. We used an auction website to get rid of a lot of our stuff. Most of the action took place in the last half hour of the auction. It was exciting to see that other people wanted our things. I was expecting the fancy French cookware to go, but was surprised people bid on our opened art supplies and encyclopedias. When the buyers came to pick up the things we got to see the new owners. My daughter was a bit sad to let go of her 4 foot tall doll house (and the accessories- dolls, clothes, furniture, car, horse...). But when the woman picking it up said how much her own little girl was looking forward to playing with it, my daughter was happy to pass it on.
Anyway, now I have a pretty minimalistic life style. It's interesting to consider each household purchase carefully. Do I really need to have bowls that match my plates? For me it's a "yes", but I wouldn't have ever thougt to ask before we downsized.
Heloise
Re: Stuff
Good Idea
The happy result is that things are getting done or projects are getting cancelled. The relief is life changing. I haven't had to throw much out yet and the place is getting organized and brightend up, lifting everyone's mood. TSW!
Keep 'em coming, specifically a post about practical and magical cleaning concoctions would be most appreciated.
Gawain
Re: Good Idea