Thunder, then a long stretch of wind shaking up Cottonwood Mel outside my window. A plane overhead from faraway heading faraway. The dampened drone of the highway in the distance while my sons sleep, the dogs snores, and Miyako the cat performs another one-act play about killing a mouse cleverly disguised as a hair tie.
It’s been too long since I’ve been able to listen to the sounds in between and around rather than the sounds coming straight at or straight from me. Not surprisingly, this replenished ability to stop and enter the clearing — instead of focusing on the trail — comes more easily to me after I’ve been moving things out of the way, specifically lots of little and big things in drawers and shelves. Yesterday, I cleaned out my desk, which doesn’t sound like much work, but indeed it was. I sorted hundreds of objects: coins, paperclips, stamps, greeting cards, and so many pens, markers and pencils I tested to see who was still up to the challenge of making marks on paper. Hauling bags to the car — what’s to find its way to the city dump, what will end up on some thrift store shelf, what’s to land in the home of a friend or family member — I felt quieted, also tired.
Everything I’ve been reading about clearing clutter lately rings through my body with a kind of freedom. Freedom to give up waiting to fit into something that, at the moment, makes me look like a multi-color stuffed sausage. Freedom to acknowledge I will never use the piles of holiday cards I never send. Freedom to say, “I have enough” to the worlds of colored paper. Freedom to release myself from the not-reading of books I bought by mistake and the not-fixing of broken flashlights. For weeks, in between travel and presentations, I’ve been hauling out the old stuff not to make room for the new, but just to make room.
In the end and in the beginning, there’s room for this listening that makes me feel like I’m just a cleared-out drawer of treasures in one of the many houses of the universe, and all I hear is a kind of music.
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