Once when I moved

Humans used to, we are led to believe, migrate from place to place as animals. Soulful, of course - let's not become unChristian - these beings eventually grew into "better" ways of being.

We can't say "evolved," since we're being unDarwinly, but I believe either way, they have come into their true nature.

Yes, I was forged in a Western philosophical tradition.

Moving one's house and/or home:

if all one has is that pot*, the bedding, the know-how to recreate the structure from readily and "free" elements, then walking to a new location when the fancy strikes or the weather threatens is relatively easy;

if one has 100 pounds of transformed trees containing memories ("knowledge") we can't hold exclusively in our minds, seven or eight or nine sheet sets (one acquired, the rest donated toward or found at recycle shops, two sets of four-to-12 place settings (thank goodness for dropping them over the years, eh?), as well as FURNITURE, artwork that's also not internalized like the poetry of Homer, troubadors, griots, etc.; then one has problems.

The scenery of our lives, whether piles and piles of "junk," with only a foot-wide aisle of space between, or the collected items that somehow retain emotional energy, or the bare, scroungy minimum of what contemporary Americans think they need to "survive," it all takes on such another hue when one moves.

Six years ago, I became activist-journalist and (no doubt feeling hindered by my Catholic upbringing) helped a chronically down-and-out couple move from a super-substandard apartment to someplace else slightly less sub-standard. Actually, I only did the shuttling of TV and other favored things of theirs to the storage facility, which had one-month's free rent due to an ad trade between the newspaper and the übercloset.

Despite the way she was always acting like she had PMS, breaking down into weeping at any stressful revelation, C. was quite usual in that she could not stand to lose the things for which she had fought so ardently.

This is a woman who went to weekend jail out in some other county (talk about transportation hardship) for not paying child support to her daughter, who was at the time over 21 and brainwashed, it would seem, to believing her father's lies about C. At least that's what she told me; it's what I would write down while she went on and on over the phone when she'd call me at work.

Anyway, she was quite cogent about how relationships worked.

Also, she was sharp about most other things.

I haven't heard from her in forever, and I suspect that the man she was with back then, whom she married a few years back, has gone through with the cheating, as has she, and they are no longer a pair. It's amazing that there is someone for everyone and again and again and again, no matter how scraggly ones hair, how poor ones track record.

The man is a Vietnam vet, if that helps clarify the pathology. C. on the other hand, seems as though she was coerced by bad habits from childhood into making crummy choices.

Point, when someone with hardly anything and who is bitching about rats, roaches, sketchy electricity and bad landlords cries about her cat, her coat, her couch, it provides a contrast to one who "has everything," who eschews the television (an unsolicited donation) and looks at the staples of her possessions stacked everywhere and in her head (visualizing the storage space three floors below and never visited) and looks at everything upon having to expend tons of energy and maybe even money on getting them from point A to a very near point B (in aborigional terms) as a cause for "re-evaluating" life.

That's where I am today.

I have all this stuff, that, while insured, I have to convince myself not to leave behind.

Part of it is that I do not believe in landfills.

When non-agricultural people (certainly not the post-industrial who are thinking, "if only I could scan all these books and just keep them on CD or harddrive. . .) get up and go, that which is left behind is biodegradeable and quite small.

Our DNA is the same; I want so much to just let it go.

Buddha has a point, but I also feel so guilty for all the detruis I have collected. It was not necessarily deliberate. I try now to take little (but clothes! always with the clothes!) from the manufacturers, but I used to take plenty, and things actually last longer than one's interest in them, despite planned obsolescence.

*not that kind