Out With the Old

For Lent this year,
my spiritual practice is one of
streamlining...

I started with light bulbs.
Out with the old energy hogs,
in with the new energy savers.
They look odd, with their spiraled glass,
but they save significant energy.

If you have not seen the documentary
"Kilowatt Ours," I highly recommend it.

Begin with conservation.
In the long run, I'm researching
replacing the oil furnace and air conditioner
with a geo-thermal heat pump system.
Don't know how affordable that is...
time will tell.
But light bulbs are definitely within my range.

The second piece of streamlining for me
involves digging my way out of the clutter.
Not a new idea...
it showed up on my 2006 New Year's Resolution list.

But this Lent, I'm decluttering with new gusto.
So far a whole box of paper has gone into the recycle bin...
some of it moved from state to state and home to home
in boxes never before unpacked.

Yesterday I deleted 500 emails...
Only 1500 to go.

Perhaps the most profound step...
this week I put four years of hospice timesheets
into the shredder bin at work.
They had filled my file drawer,
representing to me
my four years of work,
my four years of names and faces
and experiences.
It left me a little winded and queasy
to throw them out.

But better to carry those folks lightly in my heart
than to live with the anchor
of a foot tall stack of paper
in my file drawer.