Extravagance

Over tea late this afternoon, a thoughtful new friend and I talked about accumulating and deposing of things. She told an amusing story about a New York therapist who specializes in helping people get rid of family inheritances. The therapist leads the person to imagine her space enlarged without an object and encourages her to move it a bit each day toward the door.

My new friend once lived for three years without any material possessions when she was a Buddhist nun. I, on the other hand, have never been truly without, yet I have sometimes considered myself poor in comparison to others I know.

What are possessions, the things we accumulate? If I think even a moment about this subject, I remember the objects I've left behind on moving -- the books and typewriters and musical instruments, the furniture and dishes and hand-thrown mugs, the pens and dressers and clothing. It's exhausting thinking of the thinginess of my own daily living.

This busy fellow wallowed today in one thing only: pollen. He slathered himself in it, drunkenly rolling and rubbing in the extravagance of azalea. He and the flower enjoyed a short, mutually intense relationship, one in which they shared the pollen or the thing without either clinging to it. The thing itself will perhaps become another thing.

As our conversation drifted, my friend mentioned watching Vietnamese children who had never owned anything swim for the first time. They discovered one floatie toy, which they circled and shared without complaint or jealousy or argument, the feelings that arise from possession and dispossession.

Maybe liberality and extravagance and unthinginess are a secret natural order most of us have lost. Maybe I should wallow in conversation and tea and insect pollinators and azalea without pondering thinginess. Maybe these are the only things of importance this late afternoon.

(Even these things have now transformed into something else in this post.)