To Cleave or to Clean: That Is the Question

     Boundaries are good. They shape our morals, our emotional responses, our diet. They force us to use our inner resources, our intellect, our logic. They even test and ultimately strengthen our faith. And, for those of us who tend to collect and hoard things, physical boundaries can be our salvation.

     In one of my earliest posts, "On Possessing and Being Possessed," I wrote about how I had to purge myself of nearly all my personal belongings before entering the monastery, and about the multiple benefits, both environmental and spiritual, of such a purging. Had I known how freeing it was to get rid of excess, I wouldn't have waited for God to prod me to it with a monastic calling.

     Now that I'm back living in my mother's house, the very fact of it being hers creates boundaries around me that didn't exist in my old apartments in Houston: no longer can I let shelves overflow with books, or towers of tomes build up against the walls. Here, I have X amount of space and I must be disciplined. It's much easier for me to be disciplined about clothing; having lived for nearly two and a half years wearing one habit with one other in the closet, plus a "work" habit, two aprons, two nightgowns, a wool shawl, one pair of sandals, one pair of shoes, a few pairs of socks, and only the necessary amount of underclothing, I'm way past caring about accumulating a vast wardrobe. My days of haunting consignment shops and snapping up Houston society mavens' designer discards are long gone.

     However, when it comes to my books ... well, almost any true booklover will tell you how difficult it is to part with any of his/her collection. It's no good telling me that what really matters are the texts, which can be gotten through an e-reader or borrowed from the library; the actual, physical book doesn't really matter. Oh, yes it does! I could write an entire post on the tactile merits of a finely-crafted book -- or even a not-so-finely-crafted one, for that matter -- but perhaps at another time.

     Having these current boundaries forces me to pick and choose which books I want (need) to keep, and which I can dispose of without feeling as if I'd lost a limb. I very much need to rely on my monastic training in this matter, to remind myself that it's no good cleaving to things, as you can't take them with you to the grave, anyway. Rather, clean, don't cleave!  Do I really need two copies of Wuthering Heights, or The Diary of a Provincial Lady ? Do I really need to have the Collins leatherette-bound Pride and Prejudice in every color ever issued? Do I have to have both the Tasha Tudor illustrated Little Women and the Orchard House edition? If I lived in my own house, maybe my answer to all those questions would be yes, despite my monastic training, just because I'm weak-willed and book-hungry.

     But, no ....This is not my house, alas. Even as I write this, there are shelves of books waiting to be weeded. My mother is tolerant of my addiction, but I have to respect her space and the boundaries it imposes on my literary extravagance. Maybe someday I'll acquire the same detachment toward books as I have toward clothes. But, somehow, I doubt it.