Dandelions and Daydreams

Our sleeping bags are airing out on the back porch.  The sun has come up, and I’m off to an early start for the day.  After sleeping out under the stars last night, I feel grounded and connected.  Sometimes we have this mis-perception that camping out requires extensive planning, a long trip to a state park, and lots of extra hassles.  In the summer time, Brenton and I like to sleep out at least once a week.  Usually we decide to do this at about 9 o’clock at night.  As I am getting ready for bed, I pull the sleeping pads out of the closet and unroll the sleeping bags.  Everything gets laid out on the back deck and we fall asleep wondering, again, what is so fascinating about looking at the stars.

This morning the day peeked through and I woke up at 5 a.m.  I think I would sleep a more appropriate amount of time if I didn’t have such a comfortable mattress.  I read somewhere that sleeping 6-7 hours seems to be optimal for long life.  Sleeping 4 hours or less can mess with glucose metabolism, and sleeping more than 8 hours just makes me tired.  When I woke up at 5 a.m. I was ready to go after just 7 hours of sleep.  I was awake enough that I couldn’t sleep again with just a sleeping bag and a camp mat underneath me.   Now, it’s only 2 1/2 hours later and I’ve finished my housework for the day.  If I could be this productive every day, I think I could take over the world.

I’ve read that for everything we become as adults, the seeds were planted in our childhood.  If that really is the case, I’m trying to figure out where the seed was planted that grew into this obsession with decluttering and simplifying.

As a teenager, my parents referred to my room as “the center of gravity.”  When something went missing in the house, you could most likely find it in my room (especially scissors and hairbrushes).  In the last 2 years, I have turned decluttering into a hobby.  This past weekend, I realized my need for beauty is as strong as my need for simplicity.

For a while now, I have been following the Flylady organization system.  One of the key components of the system is the Control Journal.  The control journal is basically a notebook where you write down your routines so that on those down days you can look and know what you need to do without having to make a decision.

I have tried to make a control journal at least 5 or 6 times, but I never actually used it.  The notebook I had the stuff written down in would end up sitting on my counter until it got covered over with a pile of mail.  I tried to follow the rules and not get perfectionistic about it.  I tried to write the routines down in pencil or use a post it note, but those things always ended up looking junky to me.

This weekend I found a stand up photo album at a garage sale.  I typed up my routines to fit on a 4 X 6 post card.  In the extra space to the right of my routines, I included digital images of Monet paintings.  My morning routine card has Impression: Sunrise, which is the painting that started the impressionist movement.  Each card has a different picture on it.  All of the pictures are Monet paintings because Monet is probably my favorite landscape artist.  My control journal is now a beautiful work of art.  I smile whenever I see it rather than being irritated with the messy look of my hand writing or by the fact that post-its won’t stay in place more than 5 minutes so I am continually picking them up off the floor.

I think the next step in my life is learning to balance functionality, simplicity, and beauty.  That makes me smile.

In the last year, Brenton and I have moved twice.  We were in a 2 bedroom apartment (with a garaged), and we decided to downsize to a 1 bedroom, 300 sq ft. hobbit hole.  The decision came after realizing that we were spending about $300 for the luxury of having a bedroom and a garage used for junk storage.

During the move, we donated about a third of the stuff we owned.  From what was left, about 1/3 went into storage because it was loved, but not stuff we needed daily.  Of the stuff that we moved into our new little home, amazingly, we continued to declutter.  We had a box to donate about once a month.

That living situation lasted 8 months, and we found out that we are expecting our first baby.  The time had come for us to move back up to that 2 bedroom apartment.  After we emptied the small apartment, the house was full.  We had tripled our space, and the house was full before we even emptied the storage unit!

We settled in to the house by unpacking the necessities:  Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom.  Everything else stayed in boxes and got put into the spare bedroom.  I closed the door behind me and didn’t look back in for a month.  With just the necessities unpacked, my house has never stayed clean so…effortlessly!  I found myself dreading unpacking the spare room for fear of creating an explosion of chaos once again.

During that month, I slowly came to an incredible realization.  I feel just so unAmerican saying it.  I am so much more satisfied with my life–content–when I have less stuff to maintain and care for.  Could the advertisers be wrong?  Have I been sold a lie all of my life?

In my minimalist house, I found that:

• The house stayed clean with little effort
• I felt relaxed and at home
• Home wasn’t a place to avoid, rather it embraced me and inspired me to create
• Peace ruled this place
• There was “no place like home.”

Less stuff equals more satisfaction.  I don’t think it’s just about less maintenance though.  I think that ultimately, stuff can never make us happy.  More stuff leads to craving even more stuff still, and those cravings push out space for the things that are really important in life.

I took that time to plant a vegetable garden and go to the farmers market on the weekends, and slowly begin to redefine my life.  I’ve opened the door on the spare bedroom because I have a self-imposed deadline of August 27 (3 months before baby is due).  As I unpack, nothing comes out of there unless I can find a home for it.  We have dropped another box off for donations and posted a few things on freecycle.  We took two big boxes of books to the library as donations and even threw away some college textbooks.  I’ve started releasing projects that I don’t think I will ever really finish, and started thinking about which hobbies I really want to keep in this new life.

I feel like a tree going through pruning, so that my life can be more fruitful in this next season.  I feel like I am breathign fresh air again.

Some people would probably call what I am going through right now “nesting.”  If it is, indeed the nesting instinct kicking in, I am doing it in a crunchy, organic, I-should-have-been-a-flower-child sort of way.  With a name like Sunny, I probably should have been a flower child.

Actually according to Wikipedia, I am a flower child in a Gen X sort of way:

In the singular, the term flower child was later appropriated to mean Generation X children who have been raised by hippie parents, whether the child was a hippie or not: as of the 1990s, flower child could refer to any child brought up in a hippie-like household or having a notably hippie name.  People having unusual names such as Cree Summer, Moon Unit, Rainbow Sun, Star, Sunshine, or other similar names might be referred to as flower children, regardless of their politics, parentage, or cultural background.

It started with a desire to trade out all those nasty chemical, but pretty colored cleaning products for more eco-friendly, less toxic cleaning goo.  So far, the magic ingredients for cleaning is baking soda and vinegar (not together though because that would take an acid and a base and make a neutral).

Then I decided to trade out paper towels for microfiber cloths.  I figure this was the tightwad in me talking.  In my thinking, buying paper towels supports the logging industry.  I live in logging country so paper towels help support the local economy.  Trees are also a renewable resource, and the paper towels are fairly biodegradable (much more so than…say…disposable diapers or plastic bags).  Still, I can buy 8 microfiber cloths for less than $5 and use them for a lot longer than I would have used $5 worth of paper towels.  And I like the way the cloths clean and feel on my hands better.

Finally, I am in a serious decluttering mood.  We just moved, and we unpacked just the necessities.  All the extra, unpacked boxes are in the extra bedroom that will become the baby’s room.  Yesterday I got rid of the velvet scraps I had been saving for a crazy quilt.  I tried to figure out when I would have the time to make that quilt.  The answer was, “probably not in the next 20 years, and if I do have the time, I can find more velvet.”  On the way out to the trashcan, I walked into the screen on our slider door.  I came in and had a cup of tea.  Somethings are just hard to get rid of.