When you come to the edge of all that you know,
you must believe in one or two things:
there will be earth upon which to stand,
or you will be given wings.
Author Unknown

This is not the first or last time I come back to this little poem. I found it on a card I’d received from a good Sangha friend congratulating me on my 25th Ordination Anniversary. That’s been stored with other cards for eight years! To keep or to recycle, that’s the question.There are sentimental attachments to detach from before cards and other materials can find their right place. Keeping is an option.

These past couple of days I’ve been going through files stored in an attic at Throssel. Time to rationalize, recycle, let go of and generally make way for the new. There will be earth to stand on when I’m done or….there will be wings to carry me onwards! Saying goodbye to those physical reminders of the past can leave one a bit light-headed.

So much paper! SO much of it and what a weight to shift too. Around 1998 I was given my first laptop and started using email. The papers I’ve been looking at reflect our orders gradual conversion to digital means. Up to around 2000 bulk mailings went out by post and what a protracted business that was. Letters went by post too. There are box files full of carefully filed correspondence and the like. But now and since about 2002/3 there’s no evidence of filing activity. Digital filing just didn’t have the same attraction and am slightly ashamed to say I dropped doing it. Everything I do is via email, more or less, and that’s infinitely searchable.

My quandary is around the wisdom or not of recycling the great weight of paper from the past. I’m a bit of an archivist by nature when it comes to photographs and papers. Here though is a case of needing to be single-minded yet practical. So. Time to fix wings to the boxes of *ephemera and carry them to a next good use. Just as our invisible wings carry us onwards each day. We just have to acknowledge our potential to be light.