What Beauty Awaits

September 1, 2021

There’s a profundity, almost a sacredness, to the act of letting things go.

I am making forays into the uncharted realms of closets and cupboards and drawers, where lie things I haven’t viewed in years. There they sit in a box or a drawer, unremembered, unappreciated, and frequently, upon reflection, unwanted.

Nonetheless, I come across knickknacks I greet like old friends. I pick them up, turn them over in my hands, set them on a table and smile. It is an act of reacquaintance with the object and with an element of myself that still relates to it.

Perhaps I’ll remember some long-ago vacation when I gathered conch shells on the shore at Mazatlán where thousands of the large pink shells lay like skulls washed up after the apocalypse, a single knife slit showing where the fisherman killed the sea creature through its very shell.

The cruelty of the creature’s death did not affect my enjoyment of its skeleton. At least, not then.

*****

Like many activities, decluttering can be done at a measured, respectful pace, while filled with meditative mindfulness. To randomly yank open closets and throw things into the thrift store pile with barely a glance seems like a mechanical, almost combative action.

When I have approached the task with such joyless, grim determination, regret inevitably follows. I still remember things I got rid of decades ago that I wish I could put my hands on now. 

Never mind the impracticality of keeping things forever. And never mind the Zen concept of nonattachment or the general spiritual precept that all is fleeting, dust to dust, and so on.

I would still like to caress that hand-embroidered peasant blouse cross-stitched with orange thread that I got on a family trip to Mexico back in the ‘60s.

*****

Massive changes are purportedly in the wings. Many systems and things, we are informed, will be either discarded completely, altered beyond recognition, or replaced with systems or things we have had hints of but cannot truly imagine.

While no doubt many of us long for the grimly determined, “throw out the old and quickly bring in the new” version of this Ascension process, what we’re getting is the measured, mindful, ultimately sacred process of transfiguration.

We still ask, though. Where are the med beds? Where is the QFS? Why do I still have to pay this usurious mortgage?

I can only assume that whoever is orchestrating this (i.e., God) knows us humans well. And knows that to sweepingly change every aspect of everything we’re familiar with, and unceremoniously plunk down a replacement, would throw much of humanity into panic followed by complete perplexity.

At the very least, we might be left with the equivalent of longing for that embroidered blouse we gave away in the 1970s but wished we could still see hanging in our closets. 

*****

I continue my slow and sacred quest to create a peaceful space around me. Now when I release something, I’ll know that it’s perfect timing because I approached the process from my heart, which is timeless, and not from my deadline-driven mind.

Although I’m anxious to experience all the beauty that awaits us, just over the horizon in Nova Gaia, I know better than to wish for super-speedy changes. 

Or if I do wish for them, I’ll remember to cross my fingers behind my back. Just kidding, Universe. Take your time. I know you will anyway.