Hands on the Ground.

It's just so gawd-blessed human, ya know.

My dear sweet subscribers, I have owed you a letter for quite some time.

The truth is, my brain has been rather empty. 

I have felt more in my body than usual, and maybe ever. This has been a “goal” of mine for quite some time, and it occurs to me that writing is often one of the ways that I bridge the esoteric and somatic worlds. As of late I have not needed or maybe even wanted that bridge.

I’ve been doing rutty, gritty, rather human things.

I’ve been having sex, and sleeping, in, and cleaning up, and taking care of an old lady who rather quite needs me. I’ve been cooking, and driving winding mountain roads, and doing mundane errands for people who matter to me. I’ve been losing things (important things) and having them found in the most delightful and perfectly expected ways. I’ve been doing most everything besides sitting in front of my computer and tapping my thoughts through the keys, onto the screen, and sending them to you. And though I feel a tad guilty at my remiss communications…it’s okay.

Many of us spend a lot of time in our heads. They are safe-spaces, havens, and escape pods for when life becomes too intense for our bodies.

I have had a rather intense life, and I have been “escaping” into my head for as long as I can remember. As a child I often walked around with a book glued to my face. In today’s world that is a cell phone for many of us, and I, too, am guilty of that particular preoccupation. 

Whereas reading was a means of escape in my younger years, writing has been more a means of release. I have tended to write for catharsis, to gain clarity around my tangled inner world, as well as my outer relationships. Lately my journal entries have been brief, my dream-recall has been diffused, and my need to cathart has been replaced by heartfelt conversations with the people who are actually involved in the topic at hand and heart. Instead of merely writing, I have been engaging in my life and it feels wonderful!

It’s not only in the relational world; my physical living space is changing. I have been in the process of decluttering and removing more of my mother’s belongings from the little tin cottage that I inherited from her. (Don’t worry. She’s still alive, she just lives in Texas.) We have a tendency to be “collectors” in my family. Another not-so-nice word for this habit is hoarders. As I have gone through the nooks, crannies, and closets of my little gifted house over the last 4 years, I have pulled out jewelry, nicknacks, some clothes, lots of rocks, and actual trash that had been stuffed into the particle board cupboards. I’ve moved hundreds of pounds of rocks from inside the house and around the property, relocating them to places that are more aesthetically pleasing to me that also feel less cluttered.

My most recent massive project has been to address my own hoarding tendencies.

Before my mother moved out and left me her trailer, we had spent the summer clearing out the area under the sheltered porch so I would be able to turn it into an outdoor sitting area. Summers are short here in Montana, and I didn’t get around to decorating and setting up the space the way I would have liked that year, and before you could say “Merry Christmas!” I, myself, began accumulating materials for a massive reconstruction project.

The crucial element of this project was my contractor. We had made an agreement to exchange my skills for his, and to share the labor. It seemed like a good plan, but our interior “goals” for the relationship’s outcome were not in alignment. He was determined that our “partnership” would transition to a more intimate version, whereas I was utterly clear that was never going to happen. And I said so multiple times in multiple ways.

The relationship was a brilliant lesson in boundaries for me. I am inclined to think that boundaries—or rather a lack of them—is what is at the heart of most people’s tendency towards hoarding. We who have a proclivity towards collecting often have problems with saying no. Saying no to ourselves, saying no to others, holding an internal structure that translates into an external one in which routine, discipline, and compassionate care hold us to our goals and values.

My initial goal was to have an outdoor space where I could drink coffee, write, and maybe host small professional and personal get-togethers. I became completely subsumed by my contractors goal which, under the surface was to maneuver me into a sexual relationship, but above ground was to give me the bathroom of my dreams. It was a fun fantasy to get swept into, to be honest. I’m a “bathtub girl” and a “water baby”. The places I tend to retreat to for sanctuary, well being, and sanity is the local hot spring, and for my more intimate needs, my own bathtub. I have always wanted a clawfoot tub to soak in, and I have one; I just now use it for an outdoor planter.

Over the months we accumulated various tiles, a bathroom counter, doors, windows (which we installed!), and a front door (which I later hired someone to install). After that fella left my reality in a fiery rejected huff (I wrote about what happened here), another well-meaning man offered to pick up the project. He, too, filled that space with stuff that I will never actually use, some of which is actually quite valuable, before having to move out of state to get his own life in order.

It is now on me to reclaim my space, and that is what I have been doing. The energy involved in clearing things out—from an internal perspective—is the opposite of building. It’s not quite destructive, but there is an emptying occurring both within and outside of me.

I am becoming more circumspect in how and what I communicate. The result of this growing awareness about who and what I want to share with the world is leading to a refined sense of discernment, not only in my writing, but in my presentation of myself, who I spend time with, how I dress, and most significantly—how I hold my own energy.

I feel more contained, more regulated (neurologically and emotionally). I feel slower, more grounded, and somehow more real.

There is a beauty in doing nitty gritty stuff that actually transcends the spiritual highs that, I confess, I used to seek. It’s more sustainable, more human, more satisfying. It’s like sitting down to a hearty meal, dipping a well-worn spoon into a steaming bowl, and ladling homemade bites of heaven into my mouth. The best way to enjoy a meal like that is when we are genuinely hungry. The best time to accumulate anything into our life is when we need it.

I have been wondering about this habit that is known as hoarding. It’s not as automatic for me as it seems to be for some of my other family members. Still, I must confess that even as I have been clearing things out from this porch area, and my closet as well, I have been doing a little shopping. Mostly thrifting is quite affordable, and I have a rule that if I bring in a bag, I take one out. Well, the bags that have been going out have been considerable in size whereas the bags that have been coming in contain a mere few items. I can’t help but wonder though, “Am I resisting being fully emptied?” If I am, that's ok.

There is wisdom in resistance. That is one of the things that I say most often to my clients who lament about feeling “blocked”. A block, though often villainized, is actually a component of a deeply loving strategy that some part of us has employed (from a psychological standpoint) in order to prevent us from causing further harm to ourselves. What we are desiring may or may not be harmful, but it is perceived by some part of our soul, psyche, and soma as being a threat.

Is having fewer clothes or other things actually threatening? Not technically, but for a part of us that has experienced attachment and safety through “stuff” instead of other people, it may seem that way. In the book, “Coming to Our Senses.” Morris Behrman, the author, talks about “transitional objects”. The case he makes in the book is for the childhood teddy bear both “filling in” for parents, siblings, or other playmates, as well as replacing the toy’s counterpart, a wild bear and thereby becoming a “transitional object” for both our intimate connections as well as our connection to the wild.

Behrman argues that many of our modern neuroses result from a disconnection with a wild and certain civlizing of every aspect of our lives. But how doe “transitional objects” t relate to hoarding? Well, our ancestors were also hunter-gatherers; they spent hours of their day foraging for food: berries, roots, fruit, nuts, whatever bit of edible flora and fauna that they could find. We still have those instincts, but we have very few ways of engaging them. I think shopping and collecting “stuff” has become one of the ways that we indulge that very primal instinct. The difference in our world and our ancestors’ is that whereas they had limited range from which they could accumulate things, as well as limited storage, we have access to the whole world.

Open any social media app and you will be inundated by little treasures that can be shipped to you from all over the world in a mere matter of days or weeks, from clothes and jewelry to cosmetics, to household supplies and food. There is practically nothing that is not at our fingertips anymore except the actual gawd-blessed wild.

Many of us have to travel many hours from the concrete jungles in which we live to take in a bit of wilderness, to see wildlife that is not a pigeon. Asphalt has replaced fields of alfalfa, shopping malls have replaced acres of orchards, and manicured lawns and sidewalks have replaced what were once endless pastures. We are missing something, just now what we tend to think, so there is no way that buying things is going to help us get it back. Yet we are humans and so we will and that, too, is okay.

I feel grateful that doe-eyed fawns can still be caught prancing through my neighborhood, and that come spring-time there will inevitably be a black bear sighting or two around town. Just last night the cat and I both got a whiff of skunk scrabbling about the bushes beneath my cracked bedroom window. The cat lifted his head and twitched his whiskers just as I wrinkled my own nose.

And it’s not just the wildlife I love, it’s wild people, too. People who do not feel confined to a certain expected sets of behaviors. People who can fix their own vehicles and are somehow even sexier when covered in dirt and grease. And it’s not just the wild in others that I love—it’s the wild in myself.

I like myself best with a bit of dirt under my perfectly-manicured, shell-pink nails, slivers in my hands, and barbed wire cuts on my bare legs. I like it when dirt and twigs fall out of my bra at the end of the day. I like it when occasionally I have those gross black boogers that you only get when you’ve been deep cleaning something like a garage or under a porch, or maybe inhaling campfire smoke.

I’m weary of the pie-in-the-sky fantasies of spirituality that promise that if we just keep our vibrations high, mind what we put in our bodies, and keep a polished attitude about life then we will never get sick, or be uncomfortable, or have to deal with jerks, or experience an unpleasant feeling or have a difficult conversation. Well, we might also never wake up hungover, but I also like rum. I like drinking and talking dirty, and getting dirty, and making messes, and cleaning them up.

And I like feeling human—gawd bless it!

~Justice Bartlett

Image: Jeremy Bishop

Thanks so much for reading. If I can be of service to you to get more grounded in your own life, please feel free to reach out anytime.

Stay tuned for my next paid subscribers offering: a zoom gathering on boundaries, date to be announced.