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Why |
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under
the heaven. A time to be born, a time to die; and a time to have
garage sales.
Its a neat trick- making other people PAY to take away your clutter.
And lord knows, we have enough clutter. Which is bad.
Clutter, says the wise
ones, is THE major culprit keeping us from reaping the benefits of
good feng shui.
The word 'clutter'
derives from the Middle English word 'clotter', which means to
coagulate - and that's about as stuck as you can get. Clutter
accumulates when energy stagnates, and likewise, energy stagnates when
clutter accumulates. So the clutter begins as a symptom of what is
happening with you in your life and then becomes part of the problem
itself because the more of it you have, the more stagnant energy it
attracts to itself.
-- From "Clear your Clutter with Feng Shui"
So God invented yard sales to clear our clutter.
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Before |
Sadly, before you start, you must spend hours/day sorting out what to throw
out.
Hard decisions must be made- that pile of books you have not read
in five years: clearly you MUST keep them all
lest you awake at 4am, crying out and
sweating, and must race downstairs to remind yourself the name
of the dog of the neighbour of the hero's second best friend in that
third chapter of the book.
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During |
But after all that, the stuff goes out and
the vultures gather. Ah, the glamour and glitz of a garage sale.
The fashion, the photograhers. The bargains at your bizarre.
Acutally, I was real happy to see these folks. It rained like all hell
most of the morning and NO ONE came. I had visions of having to throw
all this stuff into the Jeep and carting it all away.
But after a slow morning, the rains stopped. Bit by bit our
prime collection of garbage was trucked away.
It is a sad moment in any couch potato's life
when the couch grows up and leaves home. Farewell old friend. Your
memory will live on like the crumbs of my dinner
beneath your cushions.
Here's
Queen Helen, guardian of the garage sale. After the sweat of setting
up the sale, we had two quiet days hanging out, meeting neighbours
we'd never seen before, quietly drinking coffee and reading books.
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After |
The sale was strangely cathartic.
When it was all over, I realized I'd thrown away all this stuff I'd
been carting around from OZ to USA to BC and back to USA. Stuff I'd
never really looked at but carried with me like some albatross.
Maybe those Feng Shui guys were right. The clutter in my life
was parts of Australia that I just could not let go.
Maybe this garage sale was the exact moment when
I stopped visiting America
and started living in America.