Thrashing and Throwing – Photo: L. Weikel

Thrashing

I’m sitting here in my living room, my front door open to let in the sounds and cool breeze of the spring evening. I’m tired. My back aches. A car just drove by. One of only a handful the whole evening, it seems – and it made me realize just how eerily quiet the night is tonight. I can count on one hand the number of cars that have whooshed by. It’s almost as if the world’s finally stopped thrashing about and is ever so tentatively slowing down and taking a breath.

I spent a while in our attic this afternoon trying to clear out some old stuff that just needs to go. What am I saving this stuff for? I find myself asking this question ad nauseum lately. My need to dramatically shake stuff up is acute. Not just in the attic. Everywhere in my life.

I’m not sure what’s driving it, but the urgency feels relentless.

I’d like to note that spending any amount of time in the attic is back-torturing work because it’s literally impossible to stand up straight anywhere up there. There’s probably a metaphor there that I’m either missing or choosing just barely subconsciously to ignore. Either way, I was willing to endure the discomfort and push myself onward – until the lights went out.

Lights Out

<<Blink>> Out they went. I’d just sat down to rest on a stored sleeping bag after using the shop-vac to suck up the relentless detritus created by a very old slate roof. It didn’t matter that the sun was out and it was early afternoon. Only slivers of natural light illuminate our attic on the best of days, and sadly that’s because random hailstones have put a few small holes in our slate roof, which we’ve repaired with translucent caulk. We have a couple of windows, but they’re very small and very dirty and they just weren’t designed to provide an abundance of light in our attic.

So when the lights went out, I was in the dark. The message was clear: it was time to get out. I’d done what I could in this venue.

Shifting My Focus

Begrudgingly, I lugged a very long, industrial-grade, extension cord back down the spiral, pie-shaped staircase leading from the attic into our bedroom. The stupid cord, an ungainly length, hadn’t worked anyway. I was going to have to test it because I’d wasted an inordinate amount of time trying to get the shop-vac to work, only to reach the irritating conclusion that none of this might not be the shop-vac’s fault, even though I’d been mercilessly cursing the appliance under my breath.

Turned out it was the extension cord. Who’s ever heard of such a thing? How many times have you heard of an industrial grade extension cord ‘going bad?’ Maybe it happens all the time. I don’t know. But I can tell you: it irked the heck out of me today.

After gathering up the 25’ cord and stuffing it into a garbage bag, I shifted my focus (some would call it the Eye of Sauron) toward our barn. Surely there was something in there I could pitch. (Ha – I scoff at the mere suggestion I’d have to do anything more than open a door before discovering items that could be banished from the premises forthwith.) Oooh yeah. Plenty of stuff to either resurrect or purge. This has been a long time coming – and today felt as good a day as any to end the madness.

A Sense of Urgency

More and more, I’m realizing how desperately we (I) need to do this. And we (I) need to do this now. Freeing up our (my) psychic and physical space is going to make more of a dramatic difference in our lives than anything else we could do at this moment in time. (And even if it’s only my psychic space that’s cleared – that will unquestionably impact Karl’s life as well.)

As quiet as the outside world seems tonight, I sense the same is attainable for my inner environment. If I stop thrashing and persist in doing the work to shed the remnants of hopes fulfilled and then forgotten – or never attained, perhaps I’ll finally have room to manifest the ones that matter to me now.

(T-230)