Simple

Sometimes I get caught up in all the things I want. I am getting much better at this, but still it can be hard. Lately I have once again been cleaning out the clutter, the things that seem to multiply overnight on my kitchen bench and dining room table. I am really starting to look for and enjoy open and bare spaces around our home. I like to decorate with pieces from nature, some shells, a bowl of beautiful rocks and I am forever bringing home sticks(I think my husband is saving them for fire lighters :) )

The last quote made me smile but at the same time made me a little sad, because I have on occasion thought that better than clearing the clutter. Though we know the damage fire can do having gone through one when our shed caught on fire when I was living at home. We lost so many things and that was just a shed, and what the fire didn't destroy the water did.

The quotes I found here, and thought I may need to read them a few times over.



"If you can't find beauty--for free--when you are poor, you won't be likely to have it when you are rich...even though you may have bought and paid for it." ::: Elizabeth Gordon

"The only real security is not insurance or money or a job, not a house and furniture paid for, or a retirement fund, and never is it another person. It is the skill and humor and courage within, the ability to build your own fires and find your own peace." ::: Audrey Sutherland

"What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily." ::: Elizabeth von Arnim

"It is essential to change the present mindset and abandon a lifestyle of over-consumption and greed that inevitably leads to social injustice and inequality. The Apostle Paul teaches that greed leads us to the worship of material goods, which is idolatry, the greatest sin. The Church teaches not greed but 'oligarkeia' (namely, living a simple, laconic life)." ::: Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople

"Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire." ::: Wendell Berry