Reclaiming Your Life From Clutter and Spiritual Wealth Ripples

I was cleaning and organizing my desk once....again (where do all those piles come from?) when I came across an old email that I enjoyed enough to print out to keep for future reference (ah-ah, that's where those piles come from!). It was an article written by Alexander Green entitled, "How to Reclaim Your Life", where he discusses simple strategies for decluttering. I found it refreshing. I would love decluttering using his method.
His simple method of decluttering came about when he and his family moved from Florida to Virginia. They simply left everything behind in Florida and moved into a completely furnished home in Charlottesville, VA, where their new home was furnished with everything.....right down to the bath towels and wine glasses. All they had to do was pack a few suitcases. What they quickly discovered was that they fell in love with their new neighborhood and home. As they realized they were staying, they also realized that all that stuff they left back in Florida - the drawers, closets, cabinets, and storage bins overflowing with stuff they'd accumulated - they didn't miss it, not any of it. How liberating is that?
    I love this method of simple decluttering and found it extremely helpful to keep in mind as I worked through my year plus of decluttering exercises here in my own home (and that continue today). Green mentions that according to Peter Walsh, the organization expert for Clean Sweep, a series on TLC, that we, as a nation, are overwhelmed with "stuff". There's been a 75% increase in just a dozen years of storage facilities in this country, just so we can store all our "stuff". It is said that our homes are a metaphor for our lives--- representing who we are, what we value. Is that true? Have you heard that we're not to keep anything that is not beautiful, functional or that we simply can't live without it (I had to add that third one fo myself....so hard letting some things go)? Green offers other compelling reasons for decluttering in his June 26 column in "Spiritual Wealth".  I recommend reading it. I liked his style of writing and bought his book, "The Secret of Shelter Island", a collection of other upbeat and helpful articles. I recommend reading that too.
    This leads me to the ripples of Spiritual Wealth used in the title for this blog entry. A while ago I read another article of Green's adventures of visiting different caverns in Virginia. I loved that article. I loved the idea of those caverns, and after looking them up after reading Green's article, I planned a visit to them. And yes, those are the same caverns I wrote about in another blog adventure with grandson Jack. Ripples. I wouldn't have taken that adventure had not been reading about decluttering. Ripples. Caverns. Family. Love. Connections. Adventures. All ripples. I bump into this email from my piles of stuff and have another blog.  All the while my decluttering continues. Ripples.
     Who knows what ripples lay ahead....a new house, already organized?