The Principality of Stuff

Working on the house brings me directly into confrontation with money and stuff.

As the (totally inexperienced) “general contractor” for all the work, I am usually

writing the checks. I also have deal with a lot of stuff. This is a house that came full of

stuff.

I feel a lot of pressure to convert as much of that stuff to money as I can, because I

know that we are spending money every day at a scale I never imagined spending

money. (I am a woman who feels that buying food “outside” or a coffee is a major

splurge and environmental compromise.)

We live and breathe in a materialistic and disposable society. We are often trying to

be ecological inside this environment. It is an impossible situation.

Most of my connections are simple livers: we’ve long shopped at thrift stores, we

subsist or live better off of nonprofit salaries, and we do not like to waste. We

learned long ago how to glean off the culture, and we live well that way. We become

hoarders because we do not want to throw stuff in the landfill. (I suspect that most

hoarders are actually simple livers.)

But of course, simple livers are actually simply trained in a different permutation of

materialism. At the core, we are as materialistic—and perhaps more—than anyone

else. We just create much less of a footprint. (Which is worthy.)

And the stuff brings it all out. To date, we have thrown out truck loads and given

away 3 truckloads of clothes, housewares, furniture. (Most throwout is due to cat

pee issues). But we still have two rooms of stuff, a full garage, and an untouched

basement. It would be fun to give away if we didn’t need to glean everything we can

to pay for the work on the house.

Which leads to a few simple observations:

1) Almost all of us are materialistic, captured and charmed by this bric-a-brac,

most from an earlier day. But within that, there are two groups: the “throw it

outs” and the “what can I do with that?” groups.

2) Nothing raises the value of an item as much as someone else’s desire of it. (I

see this at thrift stores all the time—if I look at a shirt, the woman next to me

is very likely to pick it up after I put it down.)

3) When someone buys something, the most immediate response is: “Darn it, I

should have asked for more.”

4) What we think we can sell an item for…and what we are willing to pay for

said item…are two totally different things.

It would be funny, but actually, this has become a sapping spiritual struggle for me. I

understand the power of the principality of stuff, within and around me. People ask

me for this or that item. If it is an item I have cared about at all, whether I say yes or

no, there is baggage attached. If I say “no” to the simple request, I feel selfish and not

worthy of the gift. If I say “yes,” I later often regret it when I need the item, or find

that it could have sold for much more than I thought.

Or if someone else gives an item away, or sells it at a fraction of its value (as

perceived by me), and I get entirely too out-of-sorts. (This is because I am always

paying these big bills.)

It all makes me feel ugly and spiritually exhausted. With all the work I am doing, I

am not in my strongest spiritual space. The additional challenge of this spiritual

work around materialism is hard to work through when I face such a list of daily

tasks.

I wish I could tie this reflection up with my usual tight ending. But I can’t. It sits here

in all its rawness, staring at me. The principalities and dilemmas of STUFF.

-Dee Dee Risher