The Courageous Life

I just did some late 'spring cleaning' - gathered up several bags of clothing and 'stuff' that needs to be either given to the Red Cross, stored in the basement, sold in a yard sale or dumped. We have too much. When I used to travel for my job, I used to love living from a suitcase for the two weeks. It was liberating.

Grasses in Arizona - January '07

And, when I would go to Arizona for yoga camps - I would relish packing the bare necessities: 5 white tee shirts, 2 pairs white 'ghee' pants, 5 pairs socks, 10 pairs underwear, deodorant... and a flashlight. When I got back home from these trips, and even from vacations - everything I came back to seemed excessive - so many drawers of clothing, so many shoes. It was so much simpler just living out of a suitcase.

Arizona, January '07

My brothers and I grew up very modestly, and the few things that we had, in retrospect, have taken on the luster of holy grails for their simplicity, functionality, integrity and lack of pretension: an all-metal folding dining set that my father painted a different bright color every few years; a wooden stool that was set just outside the back door looking out onto the vegetable garden; the beautiful mosaic tile floor of the back patio that we somehow never properly appreciated as children; the bedsheets, printed with little ditsy floral patterns that I would recognize in an instant even now. I find that the more prosaic these things are, the more 'background' they occupied in the past, the greater their power to call forth feelings and impressions almost Lazarus-like from our memories.

Berries on a tree. Catskills, NY - Nov'09

We didn't have a store-bought artificial Christmas tree which most people used in the tropics. So, my father would cut down a small live tree. He had to strip the leaves because it was not an evergreen and the leaves would dry and fall off anyway. After stripping the leaves, he painted the whole tree with a layer of glue and we used cotton balls to stick 'snow' on all the branches. Then we decorated it with multicolored string lights and thin multicolored glass foil balls. It was beautiful, it was bold. So bold that we didn't want our friends to see it. Conformity does kill courage. Now that I look at the one existing photograph of one of his Christmas trees, I marvel at my father's creativity and our stunning lack of appreciation.

Arizona, January '07

Here in America, we have so much that appreciation is almost extinct, and poor courage, like a refugee has had to seek higher ground. These days courage has to make the news to make the news, and the simple art of 'making do' is now riding the leading edge of a new 'creativity' that glamorizes frugality and  homespun unsophistication. This is now in vogue and therefore smacks of (no!) conformity. And, did I mention conformity kills?

Photos: Mine