The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.  – Thomas Merton

My mind is a magpie collecting bits and pieces of shiny things from all corners of my world.  They glitter and shine in the afternoon light, no matter that they are simply debris of broken glass or twisted metal from a car wreck.  It twinkles and glows in my peripheral vision and I sweep it up and hold it dear.  My mind is full of such flotsam and jetsam. 

It is rubbish, nearly all of it, but now and again I do find a gem and with no more ceremony than I would for a piece of broken pottery, I swoop in and collect it for my collection.

My collection is now a heap of the useless and the trivial.  When not outright rubbish, the item has questionable value or use.  Why am I hanging on to it?

I collect ideas and thoughts — my own feed of memes – to ponder in the early morning hours when the frost is on the window, the furnace is gently blowing the curtains, and the coffee is fresh.

To declutter this monument to ADHD and Procrastination, I would need an army of help – professionals of all sorts including a Hazmat Team – some of it poisonous and festering.

How would one begin?  There are relics in there that should be kept and honored.  A few gems.  A worthy souvenir from a scintillating experience.  These should be kept in a neat cabinet for easy retrieval. 

Do we do like the old miners panning for gold?  Scoop and examine, scoop and examine, scoop and examine, pick out the gold and set it aside?

How tedious that would be and not good for me.  There’s a lot in that pile of rubbish that I don’t want to revisit and for which there would be no good reason to visit.  Best to just load wheelbarrows and take it to the dump.

But I don’t want to lose the memories of holding my son for the first time or that perfect day in my backyard when I was 7 and the sun was shining bright enough to make the pink quartz on the ground glow. 

It’s not all rubbish and therein lies the problem.  The good stuff is so very valuable that I cannot bear the thought of disposing of it with the other rubbish.

One by one, I will need to sort through and separate the wheat from the chaff. 

It will not be easy, and it will be painful.  But it is time.