Author: Chery

I have had my double-dose of Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine! It has made me feel safe enough to get on a plane and fly to Texas to visit my children and grandchildren who I had not seen in a year! It has been a great trip including a road trip with my dear friend, Duane, bestie since Kindergarten!

As I prepare to fly back home to my retreat in the mountains of southern California, I am ready to reopen my retreat and welcome the hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail who are trekking from Mexico to Canada for the next six months. One year ago I closed my gates, learning that California was going into a “thing called lockdown” on my 70th birthday. Next week I celebrate 71 with the reopening exactly one year later.

The year of the pandemic was many things to many people…Pandemic: WorldWide! Everyone was touched by this virus in some way. I feel like I am one of the lucky ones who escaped with only the personal connection to a few who were hospitalized and suffered lasting ill effects. My 94-year old father is one of those and I happily report he is slowly recovering…although I don’t think any of us recover from being 94!

I feel so fortunate to live in a remote place where I am able to greatly limit my exposure. For me, 2020 was a year of isolation which turned out to be a good thing. I had plenty of time to miss my loved ones and realize what is most important to me. I had plenty of time to consider my life, my priorities and to choose what I want to do with the time and resources I have left to me in this lifetime.

2020 was a year of reckoning as I turned 70 and for the first time acknowledged my own mortality. I am not going to live forever! Really? Yup, that is the fact, Chery. And if you are lucky, you have about twenty years to live your dreams and go and do all the things that call to you.

I am telling myself daily to feel the gratitude for this life I’ve been given and get off my arse and spend time with the people I love and don’t wait to do the things that are calling to me. Time won’t wait and I only have the present moment to live this life fully and when I put my head down for the last time it can be said of me, “She did not die an unlived life…she did not live forever, but she lived!”

“All that I have, is all that I need.”

The journey is to uncover it.  It appears to be buried under layers of mistaken idols.  These idols include everything I have collected and kept over all my years of living.

Marie Kondo has caught my attention.  Marie’s practice takes me into an intimate relationship with the community of “things” which “live” in my personal space.

Her practice isn’t making the journey easier, but it is helping me see the essential when I ask her simple and profound question as I connect with each thing, “Do you spark my joy?”

Here is what I have discovered so far:

• Everything is a sentient being.
• All “my things”  live in “communities” that share a common theme.
• The journey is to gather the community of things, with their appropriate theme, into one space.  One bed, one floorspace, a room…whatever it takes to hold it all.  Every single member of the community within my personal living space is being held by me or worn by me while I ask the penetrating question, “Do You Spark My Joy?”
• My space includes two acres of land holding three tipis, a “big” house and a “little” house with porches and patios and a deck with a hot tub.  There is a yoga/performance studio in a yurt.  There is a shed and pump house, a well with a water tank, tool room, solar system and a salt water float pool inside a yurt.  There is a fence all around the acreage with four gates, over one-hundred trees, a garden, greenhouse, orchard, grape arbor, rockwork, a tree swing and a medicine wheel.

Having just begun this Kondo Journey I gathered several large bags of clothing and accessories from my closet that don’t “spark my joy.”   They did spark joy for some of my friends that I gave them to!  Hopefully the rest find homes with someone whose joy they do spark.

I moved to California ten years ago in March of 2009.  My various versions of myself came here from Illinois to the San Ysidro mountains.  Here at 4000 feet elevation, I am surrounded, not by the man-made, but within the four basic elements of nature:

• A rare, alkaline, pristine well that gives me all the water I need.
• Year round sunshine in clear, open skies and night skies that sparkle with stars and the moon.
• Clean, clear gentle winds that bring amazing weather to me from the nearby ocean.
• A high-desert, oak grove with its sandy/ loamy fertile earth.

I joyously share this space with occasional two-legged ones…and ongoingly with 3 cool cats and the tree people, the four-leggeds, the winged ones, the stone people, and the creepy crawlies…you get the picture.

“All That I Have IS All That I Need.”

I am so blessed and rededicated to being a good steward to this land that I  live on.

I am giving myself all of 2019 to complete this process of asking every thing on my property the Kondo Question!

Only Love is welcome here and Only “Things” that Spark My Joy!  Is there a difference?