I’ve had this school desk with my name on it since I was 3 or 4.
I’ve done this a few times in my life. Shed the skin I was wearing and all the accoutrements that went along with it.
The adornments on my walls, the chairs and tables and things that are a visual representation of who I thought I was at that time.
But with each molting, I would keep a few little things to remind me of who I have been on this journey.
And now after 54 years, I still have many pieces from the past. A hodgepodge of the Betsy’s that I have been.
And now as I begin yet another metamorphosis, the question of what stays and what goes weighs heavier it seems than it has in the past.
This transmutation feels as though it may be one of my last. And the things that I have carried from home to home, stored in boxes in dark places while I found myself again and then retrieved and placed back on their mantle feel less important to me now.
I have pieces that have been imbued with the energy of people that I love, but as I let them go, I realize that their frequency is within and around me and the piece of wood, or art that once represented that memory is no longer needed to weigh down my baggage as I move into a new adventure.
In consultation with my children, we have let go of so much, pretty much everything. Not because they don’t want pieces of me to take with them, but because they experience me not through the things but through their hearts and the stories they carry within them of our life together. And so the monuments of those moments are much smaller. We kept the collection of refrigerator magnets we have gathered along our journeys, but let go of the big chair. Realizing that the lighter we are, the farther we can travel.
We spent time going through multiple bins of their childhood, we had lots of laughs and some poignant moments of remembering times and places, and they carefully selected small pieces of those memories to keep and let go of a lot of things that made those boxes heavier than they needed to be.
I’m sure when I set up house again somewhere else I might miss a few pieces that I probably could never replace again, but I think I will enjoy that bittersweet moment. An opportunity to remember where and why that “thing” came into my life and why I had to let it go.
They say in death, you can’t take anything with you. In life, you can take whatever you want with you and I think sometimes we carry too much of what we don’t need and it makes us heavy and slow.
So I will carry the memories in my heart, and my soul, and I will let the “things” move out into the world to create new memories.
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A new home it will be very happy