Verse....................

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

-From the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (as read aloud here by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry)

Purging..........................

The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding oneself to the pain and imperfections of the world. Nor is happiness a state of exultation to be perpetuated at all costs; it is the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that literally poison the mind. It is also about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality. To that end, we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for, in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality.

-Matthieu Ricard

This sounds..............................

...................................................................very familiar.

I don't even know where to start.....

     Do people who have been tidying for more years than others tidy better?  The answer is no.  Twenty-five percent of my students are women in their fifties, and the majority of them have been homemakers for close to thirty years, which makes them veterans at this job.  But do they tidy better than women in their twenties?  The opposite is true.  Many of them have spent so many years applying erroneous conventional approaches that their homes overflow with unnecessary items and they struggle to keep clutter under control with ineffective storage methods.  How can they be expected to know how to tidy when they have never studied it properly?

-Marie Kondo,  the life-changing magic of tidying up:  the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing

About windows.....................................

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world.  Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”


-Isaac Asimov, as culled from here

a little harmless but definite untidiness.......

      
      Perhaps this is the place to warn you against an excessive zeal for cleanliness when it comes to ironware.  Property seasoned, iron is one of the greatest cooking materials in the world, but the average American housewife (this was published in 1967)  has been so brainwashed that she commonly scours off the cooking surface without thinking.  Woks and iron skillets should be rinsed and wiped, never washed.  If someone comes along and tells you cleanliness is next to godliness, the proper answer is, "Yes - next.  Right now I'm working on godliness."
     If, however, your family persists in a compulsive and unreasonable attitude, accustom them to a little harmless but definite untidiness in their food.  An occasional burned paper match dropped inot the gravy will help them relax a bit.  My wife has even managed, mysteriously, to include a cigar band in a casserole of Spanish rice.  Once you've seen something like that, it's hard to get upset about the fine points of kitchen cleanliness.
      A sense of proportion is a saving grace.

-Robert Farrar Capon,  The Supper of the Lamb

Out damn spot.....................................!

Hmmm........................

Justification....................................

If one looks long enough, one can find a book or a study to support about anything.  Just in time comes this report justifying my (sometimes often) messy desk:

"It also fits with the advice from Eric Abrahamson – co-author of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder – who says people with highly ordered desks often struggle to find things because their filing systems are so complicated. He also points out a key advantage to a mess – you can find things in it that you didn’t expect. Discovering that ground-breaking idea you scribbled on a piece of paper two years ago could be just the spark to get your next project off the ground."

Full blog post on work space perfection, from whence the above came, can be found here.  Love the Einstein quote, "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"

Shine............................

“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” 
― Stanley Kubrick

via