I am finally
at a point where I’m forced to confront the fact that I am a hoarder. Not a hoarder to the point where you
can’t move through my house without navigating piles of stuff. That maze is
pretty much confined to one room.
My hoarding
is only of printed material. I
don’t hoard animals or small appliances.
Nor is my hoarding dirty or smelly, other than accumulations of dust
that I tend to keep under control.
Well, I must say that spiders do love those high corners where I have
books. The incense I often burn
when I’m working can increase the dust factor. On the other hand, my respiratory allergies assure that the
dust level never gets too bad. But
we’re talking excessive clutter here, not filth and squalor as I’ve seen on
some hoarding sites.
We live in a
condo of only 850 square feet, which for someone who grew up in spacious old
East Coast homes with expanses of lawns and farmland beyond, and who spent two
decades living in high-ceilinged Victorian railroad flats in San Francisco, is
a bit of a comedown. It’s a
situation that forces consolidation of accumulated goods. When I first left San Francisco to move
to a very tiny in-law cottage with my young daughter, I took a truckload of
books to the then-Sausalito flea market.
At that time I got rid of maybe two-thirds of my library, along with
furniture and other goods.
Fast-forward
to 2013, after thirty years in Marin County, and it’s clear that my love affair
with books and other reading material continues unabated. I have accumulated more than we have
shelf space for.
When I moved
into this condo, delighted to be a homeowner, albeit of modest digs, rather
than a renter, I put up bookshelves running along just below the ceiling on two
out of the three walls of the living room (one wall is a sliding glass door to
the deck). On one wall I put two rows of shelves. I needed to keep all of what little
floor space we have for living, not for a library. I also put a shelf on one wall below the ceiling of my
bedroom. This is not counting
bookcases, including a floor-to-ceiling one at the top of the stairs.
Later when
my daughter, and later my stepson, moved out and the second (fortunately a bit
larger) bedroom became available for our overflow, we moved in desks and
computers from the crowded living room.
We also put in more shelving just below the ceiling on two walls, and
hung more shelves beneath it in some places. Again, not counting bookcases. Also not counting the shelving in that bedroom closet, now
filled with office and laundry supplies.
I realize
that, in addition to being afflicted with acute bibliophilia, I also feel
a compulsion to read everything that comes into/across my field of vision,
including cereal boxes, catalogues and bulk mail ads. I’ve gotten a better handle on the weekly ads that come in
the mail and now toss them directly into paper recycling. (I wish my neighbors in this complex
were more conscientious about sorting their trash for recycling.)
For the past
several weeks, in anticipation of accommodating houseguests in our
studio/office/spare bedroom, I’ve been challenged to dig into the many boxes,
cartons, file cabinets, folders, and piles of printed matter currently stacked
up in that room. Gods forbid an
earthquake should strike because if it does, we’ll all be crushed under the
books that will tumble from the shelves running around nearly every wall in our
house!
Well, the
stuff I’ve been unearthing -- old photos, interviews, publications, class
outlines, correspondence (meaning old-fashioned handwritten or typed letters on
paper) -- has brought up memories.
Among the
real treasures: a series of
letters and postcards from her travels from my late friend Sequoia. I will be mailing them to her biographer Kiri. In the late ‘80s or early ‘90s, she
traveled throughout Southeast Asia and India. She wrote extensive and very detailed travelogues, and I
found all of them! As I said, a
treasure.
My obsessive
archiving does have a plus side in that a lot of my material is ritual scripts,
class notes, old Reclaiming meeting notes, flyers, programs from Pagan events
over the years, stuff no one else has kept, including one from a Summer Pagan
gathering in the Oakland hills put on my the late Gwydion Penderwen
and Stephan Abbot; a program from the memorial for Susan Alison
Harlow; and a 1998 front page interview of myself, with photo, by the
religion editor of the Calgary Herald – believe me,
an interview with a Witch on the front page by the religion editor was nearly
unheard of in 1998! This kind of
ephemera, now that I’ve unearthed it, will be sent to the New Alexandrian
Library in Delaware for the benefit of future scholars.
Another
tremendous benefit in addition to providing a pleasant space for our guests is
that I’ll have an organized, uncluttered space to work. The piles I’ve been going through have
revealed plenty of useful material for current projects. Stuff I’d been holding onto mostly
because I found it fascinating. I
knew I’d never be able to find it in the future -- and of course I couldn’t
find anything I might look for the way things were anyway – so I just stashed
stuff willy-nilly. To you friends
and readers who’ve been bugging me to relate my experiences of what I think was
a heady time in the emergence of Pagan religions, this change in my environment
bodes well.
This whole
process of reviewing and culling, evaluating and discarding, remembering and
pondering the meanings of this and that image, letter or flyer is just that: a
process I’m deep in the midst of experiencing. Need one mention the obvious consideration of advancing age?
In spite of
the mountains of paper that’s gone to recycling, into file cabinets, or boxed
for shipping, and with my guests due to land at SFO in a few hours, I’m not
quite done. But suffice it to say
that I’m entering a new personal era “with visions of the past and memories of
the future.”[1]
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