Packing up all of your shit for a big move throws a sobering light onto your relationship with the material world. My home office alone filled four boxes and three Tupperware bins, stuffed to near-collapse with books, bones, LEGO, candles, wires, awards, and countless other pieces of detritus I’d fished out of the river of my life and put on a shelf to dry.
It’s hard. Physically, of course, playing Tetris with all of your very not-box-shaped possessions. But emotionally, too, as you sift through entire phases of the person you were, the person you are, and in some ways the person you will be. Decisions must be made. I know I don’t need to keep empty beer cans or glassware from an old beer festival or that one cool rock I found on that hike 12 years ago.
But I do, anyway.
“Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again,” Joseph Cambell once said. I’ve always taken that literally. My creative spaces are psychological carnivals, littered with games and buskers and shadows of myself, little knick-knacks that take my brain down back-alleys of thought, reintroducing me to versions of myself that are no longer tangible in the here and now, but are still very much core to who I am.
Moving fucks that all up. You literally have to dismantle your sacred space and rebuild it somewhere else. The disruption is chaotic, even catastrophic for those who have spent years building a haven where their brain feels at home. And during the in-between, before you’ve arrived in your new place, your mind is untethered and afloat, in danger of drifting off into the forever unknown with no grounding source. It’d be a cool feeling if it wasn’t also so terrifying and debilitating.
So here I am, building my new sacred space, throwing my soul against the cheese grater of reality: I’m 36 with three kids and a career. Do I really need to keep every lanyard from every event I’ve ever attended? In a space smaller than the one I had before? Am I who I am because of all this stuff, or is this stuff only important because I’ve chosen to imbue it with meaning?
In pagan tradition, you don’t bring an old broom into a new home. Those bristles captured all the energy of your former house, and while that energy may not be bad, it would still interfere. Sweep, sweeping, swept; we push away dust and debris, but also the parts of our lives we’d like to keep cloistered, neatly packaged up. Maybe that box gets lost in the move. Maybe it gets left behind intentionally.
When doing a final walkthrough of the old house, I found the bracelet my daughter wore when she was in the NICU. It is such a small thing, and we are one happy, healthy year removed from it. Looking at it, I wondered at how this flimsy object caused us to suffer so much fear and doubt. As I held that tiny plastic band with “BGA Gray” hastily scrawled in Sharpie across its pink face, I realized that when she was admitted, they didn’t even know her name. She was just another baby in the NICU, one of thousands. After a month of daily visits, what made her special to them was us, as a family, the powerful personality behind the pronouns, her name: Willow. The abstract personified with context, made whole by the details.
And that’s a home, really. An empty wooden box with some doors and windows made only with the intent to keep the outside out and the inside in. It’s what we bring to the home—the giggles and gatherings and generosity—that define it. You are at home first in your mind, secondly in a place.
So keep those bottles and that old artwork and that shitty bowl your buddy made in high school ceramics class that you put your keys in. They may not tidily fit into boxes, but they do tidily fit into you. And when you look at all your stuff, don’t complain (except when you have to move it all). Celebrate a life lived so specifically and deliberately, even if that means embracing all the messy tangled roots that have grown deep into the soil of your soul.
