a virgo's guide to the universe
By the time Brooks Palmer’s first book fell in my lap, I didn’t need anyone to tell me that my problem with clutter wasn’t the stuff itself. I knew full well that the crap I couldn’t seem to keep myself from accumulating was connected to circuitry gone awry—that I was collecting things to fill emotional [...]
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I have a long and complex history of interactions with stuff. Long enough that it’s hard to pinpoint where the more fraught interactions started, although there are artifacts that suggest certain “hot” times: a bright yellow filing cabinet I requested (and received) for my thirteenth birthday; a dedicated “quotes and lists” journal I created during [...]
Kinda-sorta getting the hang of these babies, I think. For instance, this one only took eleventy-six hours to export to YouTube instead of eleventy-seven. Which is not bad for a 90-year-old. Some notes! Because dammit, floating a video out there without text feels naked-like: I absolutely could not find the place where Martha Stewart talks [...]
During last night’s first meeting of the Big Artist Workshop, gentle genius Chris Wells (hey! he won an Obie!) shared the most useful hack I’ve ever heard of for dealing with one’s art as a focus-challenged person: Don’t worry about letting go of things; think instead of what you would most like to move toward. [...]
There are two ways of looking at clutter, and they’re equally important to getting a handle on it. The first (which for most people ends up being the second) is the under-the-hood way: what’s really going on between you and all that stuff you’ve stockpiled? What holes are you trying to fill, what anxieties soothe, [...]
I’m not sure if it was my friend, Merlin, who led the charge, but at some point, many of us, myself, included, gave up on streamlining, optimizing and other kinds of organizational navel-gazing and started turning our attention to attention. What it was made of. What obscured it. What attracted ours. As things accelerate and [...]
When I had few things I collected them to fill the spaces that felt scary and fix me in space so I would not float away Now I have things enough to know you collect nothing but are yourself the collection All the thoughts you’ve thought and the feelings you’ve felt and the stories you’ve [...]
Depending on your age, location and/or proclivity toward old shit, you may or may not have some experience with the mid-last-century cultural icon, Auntie Mame. The character, drawn in fiction by author Patrick Dennis from his real-life experiences as ward of his real-life aunt, is a free-wheeling spirit (or maybe a high-spirited free-wheeler) who exhorts [...]
When you take a cold, hard look at them, most to-do lists can be boiled down to a few essential items: work on something important and play with someone important. I cannot think of a more appropriate way to celebrate today, the fifth anniversary of this ungodly-long-winded blog, than doing just those two things. xxx [...]
I wiped almost a thousand people from my life today in less than two hours. To be fair, many of them were ‘bots, duplicates and other sync-rot from Google Contacts and Address Book. But a fair number were people, actual human beings, whom I’ve met along the way, one way or another, and either lost [...]
