Dreams

I find dreams can be so revealing of the subconscious. I am really good at analyzing them, I took a short course a few years ago and found that I could analyze other dreams while being baffled at my own at times.

I had this dream last night. Briefly:

A friend of mine in Toronto has this nightmare of a house, she is a hoarder and it's packed to the rafters with stuff. You don't need details - it's all just stuff. Pathways are laid out in the rooms to navigate through the garbage. Her bed's accessed by crawling across boxes. The stairs to the basement is jammed with newspapers and magazines. The window on her door is covered with a garbage bag. And this was when we were allowed in. For the last twenty+ years I'd say no one has entered Hilda's (pseudonym) house. So I imagine it is far worse now. It's a huge concern. We had cleaned her out a few times in the past but it was all in vain, she refused to get psychological help, she accumulated more rubbish and excess was poured into her car so that she could never take passengers. A typical out of control hoarder. I wrote about her here.

Anyway, last night I dreamed of her. Sitting in a tidy house. Surrounded by mannequins in various costumes, elderly clothes, lounging around on the chairs and sofas in her much expanded living room - she had bricked in the front door.

I questioned her as to what she was doing, there were at least 5 of these faux humans, heads down reading, as was she.

"Oh," she said, "Finally, everything is taken care of, see? My friends and I are really happy together. We read to each other."

I had absolutely no trouble analyzing this dream. Dreams are nearly always about ourselves. Very personal.

I realized:

(1) I am isolating far too much.

(2) I have been indoors since last Thursday and the weather has been beautiful

(3) My door to new experiences has been blocked.

(4) My imaginative life is now greater than my reality.

(5) I need to bring some flexibility in to my life. I am getting rigid.

So, I'm heading out today. To interact with some children I know.

It's far too easy to get locked in place.

A Blocked Friendship

Some of us are born with a few bits of us kinked and curled around behaviours that can harm us but opt for the soothing relief of brief sedation until reality seeps into the pores once again. I know. I've had a bit of work to do myself in the field of change when the pain of my knots and whorls outweighed their sedative effect.

The reason I bring this up is that I've got a friend of over forty years who has her own demons which are worsening (they always do unless stopped in their tracks). I worry about her. I feel helpless as I can't change her. I can't change anyone, just me.

Ever since I've known her she's surrounded herself with clutter. Not your 'normal' type of clutter like six china cabinets or 100s of Dresden figurines. No this clutter is newspapers, magazines, plastic bags and boxes, the kind your toaster comes in. Retail boxes that go back years and years. Clutter fills every corner of her home. None of us, inluding family, have been allowed beyond her front door in years and years.

The last time was many years ago to once again go in and attempt to clean her up. 2000 lbs of garbage came out of her kitchen alone (it was weighed at the dump). Her groceries lie in plastic bags on the kitchen floor with a tiny pathway wending through them. Her counters are unusable. There are mice. Her bed sits in the middle of unpacked boxes (some from thirty years ago), she has to crawl over them to get into it and watch the TV, which she does incessantly all day, all night. Everything overflows. Her pitiful collection of clothes hangs off a doorway.

She blamed her boring job for not being able to control her junk even when we all cleaned her up a few times. She's retired for two years now and blames taking her mother, who's 92, for medical appointments.

Her sister and I just know the house is worse than anything we've ever seen now. If we are picking her up, she races out front and locks the door before we can even peek in beyond a black garbage bag that she has hung on the door window pane. We live in fear she has crossed over into mental illness. But the fact that she can string herself together and behave normally at outside social events puts the denial on that.

I have personally confronted her a few times. Gently. In a non-accusatory way. I tell her we love her but hate how she treats herself. She cries. She promises to change. And she doesn't.

What is totally ironic is that she's worth close to a million dollars and lives the life of a slum-dweller. Her aged mother cries openly about it. She blames herself for spoiling her.

I love her dearly, she's a kind and honourable human being, compassionate and caring. But I'm at the point I won't enable her anymore. I won't step around the 1000 ton gorilla in the living room, so to speak. She has dropped even the flimsiest threads of human communication, email, telephone, cards. And I don't like myself when I find I respond by not providing that tenuous outreach to her as well. If I ask her why she won't call after I've called her numerous times she says she has nothing to talk about. Her life is boring, she says.

I wrote a little prose-byte about her when I got home last night which sums up the frustration I feel:

Back and forth I pass your house,
Imagining the cups of tea we've missed.
Hundreds now.
Maybe thousands of little dots of glue
That would have bound our friendship tighter.
Rather than me thinking
As I drive by
Of the blocked threshold of your existence.
Imprisoned by the crumbling files
Of sixty years of musty memories.

Anyone have any insight?

My Rules of Life---Part Four

HAVE PEOPLE IN AT LEAST ONCE A MONTH.

Sounds like a really silly rule, doesn't it? But this is a life saver for a loner. Particularly a loner who hates housework. I joke that my standards are fairly low, one of the signs on my wall as you walk in says:
"I cleaned the house last week, sorry you missed it."
And a tea towel in the kitchen says:
"Life's far too short for housework".

I heartily agree.

But I never want to be one of those outright eccentric people you read about that has to be eventually shoveled out of their abodes, drowning in five years of newspapers and rat and cat droppings. And I often feel I could be. Like I'm a dog hair away from that. Not that there's anything wrong with what anyone chooses to do with their lives. But living like a reclusive oddball with a collection of garbage bags, cardboard boxes as decor and an excessive number of cats has no appeal for me.

I honestly believe that clutter can kill creativity and originality. A cluttered and messy house can be a reflection of the person living in it. And I get that way occasionally, piling books upon books and files upon files and not putting away the laundry and letting the dishes stack up in the absence of a dishwasher here in the outport. And between looking for missing bits of my life and stroking the same pile of files seeking the errant one, I realise what an awful waste of time clutter is, as my life stagnates around it.

So the only cure for clutter in my book is to have people in. At least once a month. It keeps me on my toes. And between thirty minutes a day to maintain a semblance of order and outsourcing the floor washing and vacuuming, I stay there. And I'm the better person for it.

And the biggest bonus of this, of course, is the vital connection with others and the maintenance of social graces. I love making pots of tea and baking scones.

The Simplified Life

I once knew a man who kept reducing the stuff in his life until he was living in just one room and he said he had never been happier. I think of him often today. He lived on fish he caught in a nearby stream and from money for cashed in beer cans picked up from the side of the road.

I've made enormous inroads myself in this twenty-year project of simplifying my life. I've worked my way from a veritable marital mansion to a three bedroom townhouse to the Toronto bungalow (now sold effective May 31) that I live in today - on one floor and I rent out the other.

I am listmaking and starting on the packing and I am very surprised at how little I do have now. Lots to sell/donate/give away. Not much to store and the no attachment thing is hitting me delightfully. By contrast,I am surrounded by neighbours who are getting on in years and still clinging to the detritus and clutter of forty or fifty years of family life.

I have decluttered a few times now and everytime I do it I feel the effects internally. A huge load has been lifted. I paint my rooms in wild colours - it took me years to get the nerve to debeige and dewhite and depastel and my priority room is the kitchen/dining room where I meet with clients or entertain a full table when the inclination strikes me. I have as yet no place to move to in Toronto, I am blocked at every turn in finding a small apartment to rent in the downtown area I would like. I pay attention to this message. It is not meant to be. I have offers from family and friends of accommodation. I am curious as to what this "homeless" feeling is. Even though I do have my home in Newfoundland to go to in late Spring/early summer. But no home soon in Toronto where the bulk of my business is. I sense change in the air.

My decor is a vast collection of old and new movies, CDs and piles of books. I've reduced the higgledy-piggledy art gallery that used to clutter my walls. Laid a lot out on the sidewalk for others to pick up and enjoy. I find one picture on one wall sufficient now. I look at it more closely, study it. One from an artist in West Cork delights me particularly, full of the fall colours that entranced me in that part of the world. I did not pay attention to this before, it was distracted by others. Clutter to the eye. I have learned to take my time now in the AGO (the Art Gallery of Ontario) and just visit one painting at a time for a few hours and leave.

My house in Newfoundland is similarly simple. Decorated with books and bags and bags of lovely wools and knitting needles. A place for the soul. All sheets are old cotton picked up at Goodwill. Old embroidered pillowcases. Old soft towels. White muslin and old lace at the windows. Long table with benches in the diningroom and it can seat 12 comfortably.

My decor are family, friends and books.

(Picture is of the house in Newfoundland, thriving and stretching under a fresh coat of paint.)