Decluttering

It's often said--and I believe--that decluttering frees up blockages, and allows the Universe to send you what you might truly need.

I hope so. I feel I've been at an impasse lately with my writing. I need to clear whatever junk is in my head that is blocking me from moving forward.

The bigger picture is that I want to declutter my life in order to be able to more nimbly move forward into whatever new opportunities may arise. And frankly, I just have way too much stuff.

My project last fall--proudly accomplished--was to convert my boxes and boxes of snapshots to DVD, which in turn I categorized and saved to Dropbox. Doing so cleared out much of a cupboard. Every so often now I open that cupboard just to admire its emptiness.

The next cupboard has the record albums.

My parents, especially my dad, were aficionados of Dixieland jazz, a.k.a classic or trad (traditional) jazz, and through immersion, I too became a lifelong fan. From the time we were small, my siblings and I were taken monthly to the Sunday afternoon meetings of the Los Angeles-based organization called Jazz, Inc., and to regional Dixieland music festivals, especially the Sacramento Dixieland Jubilee. After my parents passed away, I took the majority of Dad's LPs home, thinking I would somehow accomplish what he never got around to doing--transferring the music to an easier-to-store medium. (His medium of choice was his beloved TEAC reel-to-reel.) Alas, though I did acquire a turntable with the capability to transfer LPs to my computer, I found, as I think Dad did before me, that it was quite a task if you wished to be thorough in doing so (e.g., not only the name of the band, album, and featured tunes, but band personnel, record label, and label number). And then there are those fascinating and evocative covers and liner notes...

Music is a huge source of memories for me, and even researching online for potential new homes for Dad's collection, I found links like this that allowed me to go back in time to those days when I used to sip my cup of Coke and dance in the aisles to a live Dixieland band. Those were such good times.

But I have to accept that I am not slated to be the archivist of this collection; trust that someone else with more passion for documenting the past will love these albums as Dad did. So my project to rehouse them begins today as I start cataloging what I have, consoling myself that nowadays, almost anything is findable online. (Thank you, YouTube.)

Let me clear cupboards of that which doesn't serve me anymore, and thereby create space to fill up with what I need in the way of new findings, new ideas, new words.

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