Prop room no more, foreclosure ph/fishing, Noble Eightfold Path

My favorite part of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is when they bring the guy back from his shopping expedition, and unveil his new house. It's the makeover of the space that is most profound.

"If I could only remember one thing out of everything you said, what is the most important?" I asked my theatre-director master, Leonid Anisimov, after two weeks with him. He thought for a long moment. "Affect the space first," he said.

With those as touchstones, I dived into cleaning the livingroom last night. I love how Queer Eye shows you those before-and-after glimpses, one right after the other. Messy room... clean room. White walls and crumpled rug... saffron walls with chocolate trim. I also love how, in Kipley's blog, he shows photos of himself once a month to track his progress at getting in shape.

So I made some visuals.


Amount of crap in my livingroom yesterday


Amount of crap in my livingroom today

I also discovered not all the crap was mine -- the bicycle machine, mountain bike, and guitar stand are my housemate's.

Inspired, I also washed two loads of dishes, cleaned the kitchen, and purged two grocery-bags full of papers and bills.

Foreclosure ph/fishing

When your house is in foreclosure -- oh man, this should be a whole separate post -- well, take it from me, a LOT of people read those "How You Too Can Make A Fortune Buying Foreclosed Property For a Song" books. I must get 12 letters a day, half of them in hand-written envelopes with scarily misspelled letters inside, from people wanting to buy my foreclosed property, help me sell it, loan me money, help me save my house, pray for me, offer me the enclosed orange lifesaver in my time of distress, or pretend to be an official agency acting on behalf of the foreclosure people.

"This," I told my housemate, waving that last one in the air, "Is like fishing at night with a light." A massively illegal form of fishing, by the way, for those of you who did not grow up with First Day Of Fishing Season and First Day of Hunting Season as official school holidays.

Anyway, so it wasn't hard to find two bags of paper to throw away. Or to feel grateful to Microsoft, Joshua Howard, and the gods, while doing so.

Back to cleaning

I am cracking -- making breakthroughs -- all over. With the house, habits, understanding, even how I speak.

After a 7-year spiritual journey, the final year of which was a bardo -- the space just after death -- I find myself reborn into action & purpose. This is the third time in my life this pattern has occurred: a year of laying around looking like I have totally fallen off the train, followed by sudden immense effortless change.

I bought a cleaning book last night called, One Thing At A Time. The therapist author believes chronic messiness can only be cured by a new *system* of thinking. I agree. In this, her second book, she says, "On a less linear note, here are 100 guidelines, intentionally randomly mixed. Pick whichever work for you."

Take her guideline of, Store things near where they will be used. She says (I'm paraphrasing), "Suppose your house has a lot of mail and paper clutter on the dining table. So now people don't eat there anymore. By adding a recycle bin by the front door, you can throw away most of your paper clutter as you enter. Which means less paper makes it onto the table. Which means a) it's more appealing to tackle, and b) it's easier to set aside when the table is needed. Which means the family can start eating together at the table. A BIG change in the system, all from the small change of placing one recycle bin by the door."

The Noble Eightfold Path

The buddhist Eightfold Path, describing the way to the end of suffering, is one of the best systems I know. It lays out all the vectors:

Right View
Right Intention
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Livelihood
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness
Right Concentration

Interestingly, Right Speech is considered the first principle of ethical conduct in this system. Words are an act of morality.

Anyway, here's where I think I am.

Right View = It's all connected. Cleaning my house is sweeping the temple, affects everything
Right Intention = Always leave a theatre cleaner than you found it
Right Action = Pick one room: the studio. Pick one time: now. Throw away one thing: this one.
Right Speech = I said exactly how messy the room was. I said (drew) exactly how much got cleaned.
Right Livelihood = Well, after waking up to a clean livingroom, I am having MAJOR breakthroughs today in my understanding of theatre, software, vision, and excellence. I wrote almost 50 journal pages on that today.
Right Effort = Tackling the livingroom, even though it's too big to be solved in one go. "Abandoning an unwholesome state which has already arisen."
Right Mindfulness = I was present while I was cleaning. I could tell how much energy each item held.
Right Concentration = I was as foccused on cleaning as on rehearsal -- aware of it in both the spiritual and mortal realms.