I need some new clothes. It’s time. Time to face my fantasy that the right fitting, flattering, practical but funky set of warm weather duds will appear in my closet. I don’t like to shop. But I was given a generous gift, along with some delicious cake, by my Seven Stones colleagues in celebration of my birthday. The gift of clothes. From them, inside of sufficiency, I began to wonder: could shopping be sacred?
Gina has distinguished Sacred Enough, the journey we take from enough to enough to experience, to live inside, sufficiency. Since we are already enough as we are, we are only ever re-membering, or returning to our sufficiency, to being enough. Experimenting always inside my colleagues’ assertions, I forward this: anything can be sacred. Even shopping.
To me – and I am aware this is wholly untrue for many people – shopping is laborious, confronting, fraught with too many decisions and frankly, drudgery. It’s wrapped up in the consumerism thing too, something I prefer to I opt out of whenever I can, but this inquiry is less about anti-consumerism and increasing citizenship. It’s more personal. I would just rather not shop. I am so grateful when I am handed down used clothes. And yet I recognize the ease – and the privilege – to have clothes that really fit, that were chosen, that work in the gestalt of the wardrobe. This is becoming about consciousness.
So, I am going shopping this weekend. I am making a date with myself. I am framing it as if it’s an art date (think Julia Cameron’s The Artists’ Way). Gift card in hand and heart open. I am considering it a sacred act to clothe myself, to dress myself up in a way to further my purpose in the world. Like shopping is part of my job, my work. And my work is sacred, so shall be finding and purchasing the clothes to feel good doing it. I declare it so.
And this whole conversation – the breakthrough I am intending to have while in a mall – has lead me to consider that anything can be declared sacred. Any and all of life’s tedium, the drudgery, the labor, the tasks I’d rather not do, the redundant chores, the interactions I’d rather not have. It is all sacred already. I am waking up, re-membering, that it’s so. ‘Chop wood, carry water,’ says the Buddhist, or the Taoist, or the Zen master.
Tools of Sufficiency I’ll bring along: Open heart, Open mind, A sense of what I need, Willingness to ask for help, Humor, Reading with which to take a break, Gift card, My own bags for the goodies, and Acceptance & Love for whatever I see in the mirror.