Spring Cleaning

 

I don’t know what it is about Spring, but it feels so good to shed stuff and lighten up as soon as this season arrives.

To me, Spring represents renewal, nourishment and fresh starts.  The grass turns green, the trees start blooming and the air is crisp and fresh.

Every time the weather turns, I get this urge to pack up all our winter coats and sweaters, open the windows, let the breeze flow in and just get rid of stuff!   My family makes fun of me, as I have started to call this ritual “purge fest” and always have a look of deep contentment on my face as I rummage through the house getting rid of stuff.   I likely do, as I feel like I’m lightening up my life, our lives, both literally and figuratively.

I de-clutter my stuff, my space and my mind.  I create the physical and mental space for what ever is to come.  I simplify.

I love the image that Ann Lindbergh describes in her book The Gift from the Sea of a shell she came across on a beach one day that a crab lived in.

She explains how simple the dwelling of a crab is: “his shell – it is simple, it is bare, it is beautiful.  Small, only the size of my thumb, its architecture is perfect, down to the finest detail. Its shape, swelling like a bear in the center, winds in a gentle spiral to the pointed apex. Its colour, dull gold, is whitened by a wash of salt from the sea.  My eye follows with delight the outer circumference of that diminutive winding staircase up which this tenant used to travel.”

 

 

She then compares it to her “shell”, where she lives (her house). She thinks to herself: “My shell is not like this, I think.  How untidy it has become! Blurred with moss, covered with barnacles its shape is hardly recognizable any more.  Surely it had shape once.  It has a shape still in my mind”.  “I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily – like a hermit crab”.

I loved this analogy.

But how do you do this when you have people and kids and parents and life happening all around you and all that along with their stuff is beautiful in itself? You know life.

I now keep a small white spiral shell (picture attached) on my night table above my book.  It reminds me of the crab’s house.  It also reminds me to ask myself of this question: How little can I live with?, which I think guides some of my decisions.  For me “a simple shell that I can carry easily – like a hermit crab“…, sounds great.