This minimalist thing has taken a turn for the serious.
Like a slow ventricular bleed.
My sister started posting things and the phone calls started and the comments rolled in and the cash started flowing and my load lightened. Ever so slightly.
We made pretty good money at the yard sale. It was kinda fun.
Stifling heat with a small white oscillating fan mocking us. Bitter people demonstrating rather poor citizenship to their children. Aggressive enough to verbally attack at a price disagreement. Angry enough to drop or throw things in disgust. Depraved enough to take bags of items without paying.
Yes we did rather well. Our morality still intact. No one was hurt. We laughed a lot. And in retrospect, I know now why my dad never left us out there alone.
It was quite a success.
And for me, deeply therapeutic.
It's something I think about on a daily basis. Getting rid of stuff.
For several years I mean. Like, it haunts me.
My sister, however, is the one with the gumption to execute. It had to be en una pareja.
Three years of things filling up one car space in a two-car garage. Reduced by one half.
But it's not enough. Like making ice cream low-fat. Tastes gross. And if you eat too much, it still makes you fat.
So yeah, we sold tons of stuff. Yet somehow... it's still not enough. Not enough gone. Not enough space made. Not enough emptiness.
And I crave the emptiness. To somehow make the material a fair representation of the intangible.
I don't need this stuff. No one does. But we never have enough. Of at least something.
Nowhere in America will anyone ever have enough.
"Dad, what would your friends in Indonesia think of all this crap?"
And as the men loaded an 8-foot bed back up with things to try at one last sale when it's cooler, I thought to myself. I thought through a heat and exhaustion that left me depressed. I thought, "How much would it really matter if he backed that up to the city dump's bay and heaved it into the backhoe's playground?"
My goal is to fit all our possessions in that size truck bed. And it just got filled with leftovers. Gleaned but not purged.
Why can't I do it?
Because we are married to our mammon, friends. We think this world is our own. And we are of little faith.
"When Jesus said, 'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also'
he was making a direct correlation between the things we value
and the things we put our faith in." -David Tackle
So as I slowly bleed out I pray it will be a dying to self. A dying to the order of this world. A blow to deception. And a gasp of air from the One who gives breath.
