Image courtesy of Chris Lawton at Unsplash.
All hail Marie Kondo, priestess of the domestic gods and of the home, their temple. While I may never master the knack of stacking my shirts on their side like some polyester-filled filing cabinet, I can’t help but admire her knack for pruning back the extraneous and unnecessary. Emboldened by the way she can decisively (yet reverently, thankfully) declutter the home, I decided to turn her approach to my spiritual practice (the tangible tokens of it, anyways).
- Jars of dusty herbs that haven’t been cracked since they were shipped from Azure Green … in 2016.
I am probably never going to be adept at mixing herbs and actually putting them to use. I’m much more comfortable buying a blend that someone knowledgeable has prepared for me, rather than once again risk adding something noxious to a DIY incense blend (ya’ll, it was poison ivy…I have no business meddling with herbs). If you’re like me and only bought up a bunch of herbs because you thought it was “the witchy thing to do”, it’s okay to declutter your cabinets.
- A boline knife that only comes out of its sheath when you’re checking to see if it was made in China or Pakistan.
I bought the boline knife at the same time as I bought my herbs because I had romantic visions of me going out on moonlit nights, harvesting from my witch’s garden. These days I do social media for a bakery and I’m in bed by 8pm (I’m only 35, I swear). I have serious doubts that my boline knife is even sharp enough to harvest a clump of chives, let alone henbane or aconite or whatever other nonsense I imagined I’d be getting up to.
- All of those glass bottles you’ve been hoarding like the ghosts of spaghetti sauce.
Please see my delusion in the first list posting. This seems to have been a Big Deal to me at one point. I was going to grow the herbs, harvest the herbs, and keep them in various pretty bottles on my hand-built cabinetry. I neglected to learn cabinet making, learned only an aloe is safe from my deadly black thumb, and kept my unused label-maker in the box so long they no longer make labels for it.
- The nail clippings and clumps of hair from everyone who has ever wronged you.
Stop that. If you haven’t brought lice home by now, you’re certainly setting yourself up to look like a probable suspect if there’s a serial killer in your area. For similar reasons, you should probably toss out all those vials of blood that you made witch’s jars with but forgot to ever get around to burying. They’re going to make a documentary about you one of these days, but you’re going to be on a special episode of Hoarders, not on anything Sandra Bullock will star in.
- Every book on Paganism that’s ever been printed (in both paper and hardback … we won’t even get into the digital copies).
It is a very good thing to be well-read. How many of your Pagan books have you actually read? Do you know how many of them are helpful to your practice? How many of them promote racist ideologies, sexist ramblings, or are just plain poorly researched? For the rest of the year, take the time to read through your library. Pick up a new book if it sounds really good, but challenge yourself to read it within a month and then decide if it really fits with your practice.
[Written by Ashley Nicole Hunter.]
