As far as your kicking-the-bucket thing, I’ve never heard anyone else say that but I always think that too — who else could defrag all this? I’d never want to make someone deal with it. My ideal “plan” at the end of my days would be to leave a suitcase, if even that, and all my paperwork tidy and my funeral or whatever pre-paid. Turnkey! :)

Re: information, I will invoke The Police who sang “too much information / running through my brain / too much information / driving me insane”. I love the deluge, we all do — feed us more more more… But it’s not even the quantity so much as the frequency and fragmentation — look over here, look over there. This article spooked a bunch of people because it resonated so much: Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting — I think you’d find it interesting. You must tell me about this sheepherding past sometime (!). I love those moments when you feel your mind has cleared and you start to let things back in. Like when returning from travel and your city is new again, the filters clean.

So anyway, yes. What you said. :)

It’s difficult for me to keep objects—I constantly tip back and forth between “need” and “want”, wondering what will be found if I suddenly have the misfortune of kicking the bucket before I have that stuff “in order”. For this reason I love living in my little studio—there is no space for fluff, for unnecessary accumulation. It is, as you say, more “intentional”.

I also often think of the weight of information that we are bombarded with on a daily basis—the massive amounts of entertainment, news, crap circulating on the interwebs–and find it extremely cumbersome. I’m not a true Luddite, but it all just makes me want to head for the hills for another sheepherding gig!

In the shadow of Haiti, we should really count our blessings and try to truly accumulate just one thing—authentic relationships with friends and family.

Les

Cudos, very nicely written.
Besos y abrazos fuertes.
Slds,
Michelle

Something about this post reminds me of the question of what defines “home”, and a poem I often cite, Robert Frost’s Death Of A Hired Man (full poem here: http://www.bartleby.com/118/3.html)

“Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.” 115

“Home,” he mocked gently.

“Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us 120
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”

“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”