Space - the Final Frontier

As an avid gardener, I have rarely participated in the ritual referred to as "spring cleaning". In the spring I am so busy "cleaning" my garden, that the inside of my house takes a back seat until much later in the year. It is not unusual for me to start my gardening season in March as soon as the last bits of snow and ice are melting. Why wait? Most perennials can handle the exposure and my garden being the size it is takes weeks to start up every year. Once September hits, and the interest in gardening wanes, that is when I do my "spring cleaning". By then it is an absolute necessity, the interior spaces having been ignored for the summer months. Today, I continued my purge of design and decorating magazines that I had started months ago and abandoned as soon as the first tips of tulips and daffodils poked their pointy tips up toward the sun. I tackled the stacks of Architectural Digest and House and Home with ruthless abandon, any emotional attachment I once had, gone! After that, I tackled my closet, long overdue for a cleanse. Now that I am two sizes smaller, I pitched anything that no longer fit, no longer appealed to me or no longer stood a chance of ever being worn again in this century. There is something very liberating about this sort of exercise. I received an email from a friend recently that suggested that ridding your space of unwanted or unused items was tantamount to freeing space for other things to enter your life. Not sure what the "other" thing(s) may be, but now that there are some open spaces on the shelves, there is room - so come on in! As a final hurrah to the purge, I descended to the basement closet where my last purged items landed. Now it was their turn to leave. I considered taking some of the lesser worn and newer items to a local consignment shop, but I knew if I decided to do that, they would just end up sitting around in bags and boxes and the chances of me ever getting around to actually making an appointment and doing it were slim to none. Garbage bags to Goodwill were more likely to make a clean and quick exit out the door, so that was a no-brainer. The other great thing about freeing up the space, is the ease it creates to find things. And this time, I don't plan on filling the spaces. I want to contemplate the emptiness like a meditating mind. Ohhhhmmmmm.