Hello, Universe, are you trying to tell me something?

I am sitting on the bed in my childhood bedroom, a room panelled in honey-colored knotty pine, listening to the rain on the roof just inches from my head. Now a resident of California, I haven’t heard the sound of rain in months, and the rumble of thunder is delightful, comforting.

If I look out the window, the rain and clouds obscure the view, but I know well what is beyond them: Puget Sound and the Vashon Island Ferry docks to the southwest, and the Olympic Mountains to the west. For now, though, the horizon is the rooftops across the street and the treeline a few blocks away.

I am reminded, being here on this rainy day, that grey and green is a soothing color combination, one that you have to have lived with to appreciate. It is quite a contrast to the combination of blue sky and golden hills that is the horizon of my home in Northern Califorinia’s East Bay.

I am sitting on the bed in my childhood bedroom, with my mother’s cat, Tommy, purring at my feet. Tommy is three times as big as my cat Abby, and one and a half times as big as my cat Rocket, who are at home in California. Tommy is taking care of me, making sure I get enough Feline Time while I am here.

I am sitting on the bed in my childhood bedroom with a borrowed laptop on my lap. My own beloved MacBook Pro, labelled “vintage” by Apple, gave up the ghost a few weeks ago, and a friend of my roommate is experimenting to see if he can pull six years of files, photographs and music off of the hard drive. (“What, you didn’t have a back-up?” I hear you tut tut. I thought I did; my external hard-drive was whirring away several times a day, but the files are all from the first backup in 2011. Only the database files have recent dates. Lesson: Test everything at least once a year. More often is better.)

When I moved last year and held a gigantic moving sale and let go of many things, I began thinking about the difference between connection and attachment. This year, as I have wrestled with selling my Corvette, the difference between attachment and connection has become a lot clearer. Contemplating the loss of my files, music and photographs brings it up again.

Hello, Universe, are you trying to tell me something?

When the Corvette was broken into at the beginning of this year and many of my favorite CDs were stolen, I thought, “Ah well, most of them are in iTunes on my computer.” Not all, but many. Now those are gone.

Most of the photographs are on memory cards, either in my camera bag or in storage. But the edited versions may be lost forever, except for the ones uploaded to WordPress. Ah well.

And the files… some can be recreated, some cannot. Much is just historical archive, files I have accumulated over the years. But I will be sad to lose the poems and essays I have written and not yet published. It is a challenge to lose the budget spreadsheets and resumes, the invoices, all the files I was able to just open and replicate as needed. Ah well.

Thinking about all of that, I mind me of the difference between accumulation and collection. Much of what is hidden on that hard drive was carefully created and collected, but much was just accumulated. The accumulation I won’t miss that much. But the things I had consciously collected, those are different. Ah well.

I am sitting on the bed in my childhood bedroom, on my first vacation in a year and a half. I am here for the wedding of my cousin, an occasion of great rejoicing. Not just a public commitment and celebration of love, but a validation. That something that was denied to him and to so many others for so long, and still is in many places, is now available to him. They were always worthy, but it took society a while to catch up. This is a celebration of inclusion after being excluded for so long. A celebration of connection. An event of fierce and tender Joy. It’s going to be one hell of a party.

I am sitting on the bed in my childhood bedroom, thinking about how to get together with everyone I want to see while I am here and still get some rest, still spend some quiet time with my mom and my immediate family. Thinking about how to maintain those connections, and build some new connections with people with whom I have only corresponded.

Connections. Versus Attachments.

Collections Versus Accumulations.

Worthy musings for a rainy morning in my childhood bedroom in Seattle.

Where are your connections vs. attachments?
Where are your collections vs. accumulations?
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