Gratitude Journal : August

Posted on September 2, 2021

For Wiona Laduk and front line activists, for the relentless work to stop Line 3 pipeline. ( What we can do ).
To be on the road for weeks at a stretch and to seeing the country when the seasons change. Reading travel writings of Basho made me do it. He travelled the countryside and used seasons to experience change. He observed by walking. I drove. I am part-time climate-fanatic. The other part of me lives for joy of discovering this earth while I can and it’s still there. #lowCarbonTravel
To all the friends who allowed us to stay in their homes along our 4000 mile road trip. We surrendered tired bodies and brought dog hair into their elegant rooms. They recharged us with food and good conversations.
To my puppy for becoming a travel dog. For not whining and sitting in the back of a car for a month. For forcing us to break our journey and visit public lands along the way so that she may pee. For being the ice breaker so that we may talk to strangers in new lands.
To my partner for driving 4 hours for every 2 hours I put in.
We purchased a photograph I liked and are getting ready to put it up on a wall. It’s a first for us.
To Vipassana meditation, for helping me calm down. To ashtanga yoga, for teaching me the breath-movement-gaze technique.
For Cinco, the cat, and our wonderful neighbors who have been taking care of him.
For my niece and nephew for the joy they can induce.

Reading :

Willa Cather on creative joy of all activities

In praise of walking, a poem.

what comes after minimalism.

Beauty, after a lifetime commitment to repair and reuse.

Best textbook on every subject !!

“There is something about a little darn in the cuff of a cardigan that somehow makes you feel hopeful“

Materlialism :

This silk red skirt, for keeping a certain fantasy of a date night alive.

This crystal pendant for making the light blush.

My dust pan for enchanting me while I sweep.

This match striker for being cute.

Gratitude Journal : July

Posted on July 12, 2021

Foraged foliage from our 2020 fall hikes, continuing to teach us lessons in beauty.

Met my first roommate from grad school after a decade. For a weekend, we were those young woman again, drinking whiskey, sharing stores to get to know each other and acknowledging the good/bad/ugly in our lives. Like a great first date.
For the bookstore hauls I did. My idea of a rich decadent life has me being able to buy books I want to explore, without worrying about budgets and spending. And then stuffing them into the free library on our street to share with our neighbors.
Farmers CSA box. Going to the farm on Sundays to pick it up, makes me very happy.
Finally could sit outside a coffeeshop and people watch. It’s been a fantasy to do so, since the pandemic hit us.
For the long nights I get to sit outside in the courtyard attached to our apartment building, when the full moon and good weather co-exist. Puppy on my side and an e- book in hand, is one of the many heavens I can imagine for myself.
Naps. Exhaustion. More naps. Audiobooks as lullabies. (Currently. )
To Dr. Ayana Johnson, for doing climate work in style. Any time I feel despair, I drop in on her page and recharge myself.
Realizing more I look for delight, more delight there is to be found. I am building a delight muscle. Every corner is screaming ” take a moment to see me. ”
Walks. Puppy slowing me down to sniff every thing in our path and to greet every human being we meet.

Grateful for my partner. My father once asked me who I would be if I could be anyone. I told him “a dolphin swimming in the ocean”. He replied “then, I want to be your father dolphin swimming in the ocean too”. On some days, I feel this way about the people in my life.

Reading :

This old blog reinstated.

On beauty. ( “…adoration or appetite. Lust or love. Lust is about taking. Love is about giving”. )

These Japanese gardens.

The quiet joy of cooking.

A dance with systems.

Simplicity, a good perspective.

Addition by Subtraction.

BBQ ideas : part1 & part2

These workshops by TOAST.

Materialism :

This bra, the best I ever had.

Joya Mukerjee Logue’s paintings.

Arte Italica‘s blue and white pottery.

Too Small to Matter : #15

Posted on July 9, 2021

What was the starting point for ‘Sherni’?
Sherni is about a tigress that is losing her habitat due to human intervention. She has come to the fringes of the jungle, where she encounters human beings. This is the starting point of the film.
Vidya Balan plays a forest officer, an experienced but gentle and empathetic person who is trying to bring change, but is not being allowed to do so. She’s also absorbed in her personal life and feels like she is not being taken seriously. She’s thinking of quitting her profession when this incident happens. That’s when she starts taking a deeper interest and realises that conservation is anthropocentric. It cannot be removed from humans, and human beings need to be actively involved. The tiger is the symbol for preserving nature and the wild.
Why focus on a tigress?
Basically, this is a story about conservation and the need for it. It’s a topic that is the need of the hour. The tiger is a flagship species for conservation in the sense that if you protect the tiger, you end up protecting the ecosystem that the tiger lives in. You protect bugs, bees, butterflies, the animals the tiger feeds on. This is why we focused on the tiger.
Writer Aastha Tiku’s thought was that in order to bring about positive long-term change, a whole lot of people need to make a whole lot of effort. Man is not separate from nature. From a young age, we are taught that it’s man versus nature; that we are different from animals, plants and insects—but we are all part of nature and if one gets affected, we all get affected. It’s a chain.
How did you shoot the animal scenes?
The tigers and some other animals are all visual effects (VFX). It would have been much cheaper to go to Thailand and shoot with real tigers but that was not the message we wanted to send out. We didn’t want to shoot with animals that were captive and exploit them.
Source.

What was your approach in directing Vidya Balan?
Vidya’s character is a forest officer who is jaded and disillusioned with what she is doing. So we wanted her not to be the Vidya she is in, say, some other films of hers–exuberant or lively. It was written like that. We didn’t want her to have a saviour complex. We just wanted her to have empathy for what she does. We didn’t want her to be nice for the sake of being nice, or polite for the sake of being polite, but somebody who does her job, somebody who has her own problems in her life, but somebody who listens, learns, collaborates
“she also has this belief that one person cant save this entire community and you need to empower and if you are in a position of power, you have to make sure that you distribute it. you make sure that it is a community effort and that the effort is sustained .. and not there for a short period of time. she sets up these systems because it is something that she believes in …. compared to what one may expect from a “hero” which is very “alpha” she is somebody who is soft natured … she is got a very strong will, but she is gentle she is humble …. she has got all those qualities that we really need in people who are in positions of power. and who can make change.
In Sherni, Vijay Raaz’s character Noorani is an expert in moths; he is a small–scale scientist in his ownesoteric way. The Head of the Forest department, Bansal (played by Brijendra Kala) is a connoisseur of shers. What is the idea behind such characters?
Through Noorani’s character we wanted to show that one needs to have a holistic approach to conservation. In Noorani’s house there’s a picture of Salim Ali (famous Indian ornithologist) right behind him. But he is a moth expert (although some people think he is a butterfly expert) who is talking about tigers. It’s all linked. Noorani is a “systems thinker.” He understands the interconnections between these sciences and the politics and he understands the interconnections between the people. We met a few of people like that. They are not obsessed with publishing papers; they are truly sage-like in the way they go about their work. They are really passionate about what they do, and they approach it with deep love and sincerity.
Once you start getting deeper into conservation, man–animal conflict is one of the first things you learnabout. It’s a complex issue. Was the idea of the film to capture this complexity?
We didn’t just want to capture the complexity but we also wanted to give a solution, that conservation can’t be hero-driven. Vidya Vincent’s character neither saves the tiger nor she finds the cubs—they are found by the locals, the forest friends. Conservation is a community driven process. It requires time and effort from a whole lot of people.
Is there something else about the film you want to talk about?
The music was a tough thing to crack. For the song, “Bandar Baat”, composed by Bandish Projekt, lyricist Hussain Haidry has used the tale of Billi and Bandar from Panchatantra. But for the background score we were very clear that we didn’t want it to sound like a “jungle film” with peculiar percussions and drone-like instrumentation through which cinema has exoticised the jungle. If you notice we have not tried to look at the jungle as a mysterious, dark, dangerous place. We have looked at it as something open, accepting, warm. That is the philosophy with which we approached it visually as well.
Source : FilmCompanion

This is my understanding of climate progress or lack there of, from where I am standing. (Must be totally varied for different tribes. I would love to know how this graph looks like from your point of view.) We are loosing. Policy always lags behind the science and is linked to collective consciousness of the citizens. No democratic government has been able to subvert the will of the people in the mid/long term. Industry is eager to relocated where ever they can get away with polluting our earth : privatize the gains, socialize the harm. Industrialists are eager to have the marketing departments rewire our brains to not see the harm : privatize the gains, socialize the harm. The rich, are strengthening their fortresses to brace for impact or trying to go to Mars. We are in a stale mate. In this polarized political climate, I think art can help raise our collective consciousness and move us all forward. ( Coz shoving facts and numbers in peoples faces hasn’t helped. ) Art can help with imagining other ways of living and joy. Great art can influence culture. Let’s share our finds and give artists their due. Let’s make it profitable to make progressive art. Maybe then, climate movement can poach artists the way marking departments do ? Thank you Amit Masurkar for your work.

Dreaming: a Cozy Home

Posted on June 24, 2021

The pandemic shoved me into a nesting state of mind. Our current home is the 14th place I have lived at, in the last decade. I wanted to live in as many places as possible and keep moving. This is slow travel. However, the season of travel and needing to meet as many ways of living is fading. I want a true winter where I stay put and hibernate. (At least for a while.) Maybe it’s Wendell Berry’s words that made me think deeper about living well in a place, instead of hopping from place to place and glazing surfaces as a global citizen. A home with friends and neighbors whose lives we are a part of, over a long period of time, is what I ~~want~~ need. Going in and out of lives of people, was well and good when we were all young. Our friends need us to be reliable part of their families and we need them to be in ours. It was hard to watch death touch our families and not to be around to help out/ask for help. The pandemic taught us this lesson. A tree that grows tall too fast results in shallow weak roots that can’t weather the storms. It is time to slow down and grow my roots. Any place and every place with him, has been a home. I couldn’t image more joy than us two. Then came the pets : Hombre, Cinco and Mina. They doubled the laughter and the wilderness in our home. Life has been good to us. We have to move soon and I am dreaming of a home to stay put in.

home . /hōm/ . a feeling
Where I live with or without him.
A place of beauty and utility.
A place for our animals/humans to spill in and out.
A place for green renaissance and less greed.
A sense of belonging, communion and security.
A place for fasting and feasts. A place for rest. A place for life to develop.
where we invest in the land, the water, the air, the people, the neighborhood, the city, the state and the country.
Land that provides and loves us back in some capacity. But those who love a land the most, make it their home.

What should my home look like ?

Decor is the fun part. The rest is stress and expense, now that buying a home in America resembles the Hunger Games. The ‘how to upgrade your home to make it a retreat away from the pandemic’ articles really worked on me. A home. I thought about it a lot and wished for a place to invest in. I envied my friends who made their homes cozier and retreated to their backyards once the lockdowns began. I quickly got over fashion and turned on my radar towards all things house related. Every blue dress made me think “this money could buy me a baby manzanita tree” or “this could fund a part of the rug” or “let me buy some Microsoft stock and use the dividends to reimburse for that desk”. After decades of sleeping on the floor, I am now getting ready to buy a bed frame and some duvet covers. As Mr.Diderot (effect) would have it, other nice things my house could use are on my mind. What started as a piggy bank of dollars for a bed became a small pot of money put aside for home goods. A desk, a coffee table, a lamp, a rug, olive tree, … a grown-up wishlist came to life.

The initial draft of this blog post ended here. This was supposed to be a placeholder for a wish list that gets edited till I am ready to make my home.

How should my home look ?

My first attempt at answering this question came from stitching up images from Pinterest and wishlists from furniture stores.

A better question to ask : How should my home be designed for living ?

Is this a question that can be answered in material purchases ?

It’s like going to an art auction to become an artist. It’s like going shopping to the mall to find one’s personal style. Figuring out form, proportion and color that works on me helped me find my uniform. The equivalent : Learn some fundamentals on home design principles and find ways to add beauty where ever I live. It did shock me as to how little attention I paid to how good design correlates to what I liked.

Designing a home for living : part 1, part 2, part 3. ( Changed the way I see spaces. )

Small Spaces : basics, blank space, choosing furniture, on cozy, ideas, more ideas, more ideas, decor,

Lighting : basics, candles, 101 for the American sensibility, color palette, mistakes.

Floors : wood tones, choosing a couch, rug.

Walls : paint 101, white paint, hang art,

Misc: window treatments, wabi sabi, …

There is lots of new information in here for me. At the least, it woke me up and forced me to pay attention. Walking around NYC/Boston/Portland/Maine-country-side/rural-Vermont/Cape-Cod/Conneticut-suburbs and observing spaces, has been an education. Most of the magazines and interior decor media is full of mansions, high celings and big budgets. In my case, I know that I will always live in a small home and need the design-wisdom tailored to small spaces. Maybe in a year, I would have learnt some.

How should my home look ?

is this the question I should be asking about writing down that ‘a home is where I live with him and my animals’ ?

Maybe the question should be :

What should a home feel like ?
cozy. “We can see each other from where ever we are in our home”, my father once said about what he likes the most about our childhood home. Feeling each other’s presence, is a requirement. Should have a room to retreat into when we need our space to work.
It should force us to observe sunset and sunrise. Shadows and light must do their dance, through the windows and doors.
Should not look staged. Will embrace the necessary chaos.
Will embrace age. A great-grand-mother’s beauty, is the kind I want.
Should aide with sleep hygiene.
Should be brimming with life and decay. Candles, twigs and flowers.
have stacks of books. have beloved plants. very little furniture. Enough textiles. Good light.
Corners with details. Some mismatched artifacts from the material remnants of our memories.
A patch of green , some soil to tend, walkable neighborhood, public transit.
authentic : the way we live matches our values.
Not reek of material luxury.
beautiful, comfortable, have umami, …

Writing my desires, made me think of Nikaela Marie and her writing at Rose & Crown. There is this feeling I get when ever we go camping. like we are washing away the over civilization and rediscovering an ancient call with-in …finding a certain animalistic joy in the wild … how little I need for so much happiness…. that feeling you get when you hear an old fav song and recognize it …. the high you get after you do yoga and think “I feel better than any spa treatment right now”. The feeling you get when you realize that the joy was inside you all along and its there for you to find when you stop being so distracted … Her photos and words and her life reminds me of a certain purity in happiness, unadulterated by consumerism and some false idea of perfectionism. Where old things are used, people are loved and little pleasures are celebrated. Her home is my biggest source of inspiration. I constantly find myself distracted by shiny homes, products and wishlists. Her work, grounds me and forces me to remember what’s important.

Leonard Cohen knew the right question to ask : “what happens to the heart”

“lets stop with our wish list here. enough. Lets not get carried away with what to buy for the house and which house to buy.”

“I wont buy shoes though the year. But I will own lots of candles and light them generously. We will have beautiful light every night.”

“I will drink my morning coffee outside, everyday”.

“I will finally get a set of plates that match. “

“Lets print out some of our fav photographs and put them on our walls. I want one of my great grand mother”

“If our home is old and run down without shiny things, let’s not feel ashamed and apologetic about it. Let it creek. Let’s invite people we like and have feasts.”

“I want a lounge chair from which our guests will complain about having to get up, when leaving our home. let this lounge chair have an imprint of my body coz I spend too much time with my books in there.”

“Pet hair on our guests, so that they remember us for days after they visited our home. “

“Let there be bread, oils, dipping sauces and full bellies. Let there be lots of biryani. Let there be smoothies. Let there be tea in large mugs. Let there be whiskey in the winters, beer in summers and long conversations. “

“Nothing is stopping us from having any of this now. We have the good life, now. Let’s not forget. “

“Has to have an honor code for sustainable living”.

Sustainable home
is the square footage not built. Is forests/meadows/grasslands/swamps/groves not cleared for suburban sprawl.
is the home reached by public transit
is a home without the large gas guzzler parked in front.
is one that replaced its lawn for a native garden.
is a neighborhood that doesn’t have regressive zoning laws, builds upward and has green public spaces.
Is one without NIMBYS who make housing unaffordable to everyone else.
is the renovation and redecoration put off.
is a home that replaced its gas furnace with a heat pump.
is a home with solar panels / in contract with a utility company powered by renewables.
is a home with induction stove.
is full of old things used and reused.
is full of humans who live a low carbon lifestyle.
is full of humans who earn a living by not pedaling products that cause harm.
has humans who work to make the place better for all of us.
is a love letter to the land it sits on.

Spring Cleaning Re-forged

Posted on June 20, 2021

Every Indian household is in mourning. COVID in India took a turn for the worse and no home went untouched. One can try make sense of death by making peace with decay, by meditating and by being in awe of the great carbon cycle we are all a part of. I don’t want to see death as end of life, but a part of life. After I die, I would like my carbon to eventually go into the soil, grow into moss, nourish insects, become rocks, be part of clouds, form tree rings and reach the oceans. (Currently, my carbon is perpetually parked indoors on a chair by my desk.) All of this is tragic and beautiful at the same time. These are the perspectives I tap into, to find solace in natural life cycles. However, these are not words I can speak to anyone in grief. These are not the words I want to listen to, when my mind is lost to sorrow. These are not words one should use to let elected officials off the hook for a job poorly done. Beyond a point, it’s all helplessness and letting time do it’s magic. Sometimes, by helping others, we end up helping ourselves. MissionOxygen was where I rage donated and momentarily felt less helpless. ( The biggest donor stayed anonymous and I will forever be in awe of this human. ) Licypriya Kangujam, a grass-root climate activist, will always and forever have my support when she fund raises. Small organizations on the ground maybe the best way to serve communities. Indians had gone from waiting for saviors to come do something, to rising up within. When in stress, I used to distract myself with consumable goods and experiences. This year, I am doing some death cleaning instead. I re-read these words. Excerpts from these books helped : Practical advice from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition & Japanese death poems. I cleaned.

Handwash Winter Clothes.

Clean sweaters, socks, jackets and store them after winter has finally left us. One per week. I am finally done.

Why not drop them off at the dry cleaners, you ask ? Glad you asked.

Firstly, the money not spent on repeat. It’s a garment, not a subscription you got to pay year after year, to own and use.

Secondly, hand wash with olive oil soap is good for the clothes and the environment.

Thirdly, if I hand wash, I wont buy sweaters that aren’t a true need. Coz who wants to do more hand washing for a fun sweater worn 5 times during the season ? I wont prematurely throw away a sweater that I cared for, for the last 6 years either. I notice the wear and tear. Spot cleaning has become second nature. ….

Feel the burden of you possessions and you will live lighter.

What about time spent, you ask ?

If you grew up looking down upon humans who clean or have been told that you are too important to waste time cleaning anything by yourself or have never held a service job in your life, this philosophy can help with cultivating the mindset : A monks guide to a clean home. (Or learn from mothers and fathers who mother. )

I digress. The sweaters and socks have been washed. The outerwear, spot cleaned. My apartment deep cleaned. Seeing my possessions ready for the next year of service, fills me with gratitude.

Further reading : The Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Simple Living.

On Decluttering :

The way I perceived decluttering when I first started practicing minimalism isn’t the same as I do today.

I can no longer clap when an aspiring minimalist proudly declares that trash bags full of stuff has been thrown out. Influencer minimalism has become synonymous with decluttering. It is disproportionately lacking in the tools necessary to develop the necessary mental models to desire less and need less.

Unless a philosophy and a spiritual practice steps in to address the deficit, minimalism will continue to be : buy, declutter, buy, and purge again.

Or worse, we may end up viewing minimalism as boring / depravation.

And minimalism reduces to a trend that eventually fades away.

Clothes :

Till I know for sure that I have reached a certain level of peace in my mind, I decided to not declutter my clothes. My history supports this decision. Over time, I have slowly added back as many second hand clothes as the fast fashion scores I vigorously purged after reading my first blog post on minimalism by Joshua Becker. Reading about 40 item closets from a vantage point of a 90 item closet and thinking that decluttering is what it takes to be content with a 20 item closet, is a failure of my rational capabilities. Minimalism is a mindset. Decluttering is one action. Till the root cause is addressed, tinkering with the symptoms is counter productive. I haven’t decluttered for years now.

This year, I only subtracted the garments I no longer fit into, after some weight gain.

That blue dress from Phoebe Philo’s Celine that I thought I will wear till I turn 60. It’s now listed on RealReal.

The wrap silk dress that once made me feel French IT girl ? Realreal.

A wrap dress that looks very wrong on my new body. Craigslist.

A sweater that is too tight. Donation box on my street.

A pair of raw denim I cant button up. Stored in a box because I cant wrap my head around letting it go yet.

Shoes.

James Clear of Atomic Habits said something in the lines of “If you focus on the number on the scale, rather than becoming healthier, you’ll start to do unhealthy things to see that number go down”. Rather than trying to find shoes to get rid of, I tired to develop some habits :

Declutter influencers and limit exposure to advertisements. No aimless wandering through the stores please. No need to check out seasonal collections as they arrive.
Limit spending time on instagram, my #1 source of what’s new in stores and what’s up with the Joneses.
Limit spending time on the phone. A tool should not dictate how I use it. I should be the master of the tools I buy and use for the purpose of my choice.
Dont look up to style bloggers for inspiration. Someone whose entire focus of their day job is to dress up and sell ads while doing it, will have a different set of resources and goals to begin with. Look to older women who live interesting lives and somehow figured out their personal style while at it.
Record wear. Practice gratitude. Wear and re-wear, is what is releasing me from the cycle of buy-dissatisfaction-irritation-purge-desire-buy.
Find ways to experience beauty and creative expression outside consumerism. A camera and a walk does it for me. Every building on every street has a story to tell. Every tree and plant has the potential to contribute to my happiness. Walking is my soul food.
Instead of asking “can I afford it and wear it”, ask “do I need it? Can you explain this need to a person who is underprivileged, without cringing? ” This month, I heard the words “This house only has 5 bedrooms.” “Dont deprive yourself of ____. If it makes you happy, buy it. You have to live your most authentic life.” I will try to remember how I felt upon hearing those words. I finally understand why I see “eat the rich” signs at protests. Empathy is inversely proportional to privilege. Negative externalities are not even acknowledged, let alone considered.
Allocate free time to hobbies that help de-stress. I like cooking and writing. Do not turn hobbies into income streams/career if you don’t need to.
Take up practices that improve emotional strength. We can NOT resort to retail therapy or buy flight tickets, when we are happy, sad, depressed, desperate, anxious, enraged, … as a temporary distraction. We can not run from one dopamine hit to another to drown out sorrow. Mediation helps me. Exercise, helps. Sleep, helps. Crying it out, helps. Hugging my puppy, helps. Talking to other humans, help. Allowing the grief cycles to take their natural course, helps.
Consumer identity is inversely proportional to one’s ecological identity. We have to try to live well on the land we inhabit. Learning about the native trees, plants, soils, water bodies, our waste streams, ecological history, current pressing concerns, network with gardeners, network with zoning activists, network with environmentalists, checking in on my fav tree on my street every day and observing her changes, supporting the small farmers in my town, … help me expand my community. If not, I would be lost in some sci-fi utopia and be perpetually waiting for tech saviors to come fix non-tech problems.
The message of most ads : “It’s YOU. You, you, you. You are the most important thing in the world. You will be made better by what I am selling. You deserve this object I am selling. No externalities need to be considered”. When I find myself thinking like an advertisement, I try to sleep on it. These impulses pass.
To be human is to have 3 kinds of desires : to possess, to know, for sustained thrill/pleasure. Excess focus on possessing makes us passive consumers instead of citizens who can critique corporations and systems. Excess focus on pleasure seeking thrills makes us shopaholics, frequent flyers, philanderers, trend chasers, perpetually chasing our tails, fixated on going to Mars, … Focus energies on the desire to learn.
Make peace with the silences and the lows of the day. Learn to be without constant stimulation.
Find your 3rd place. ( A third place is a location where you can hang out that isn’t your home or office. A place you can visit to just be, does not require you to spend money to be there, welcomes humans of every socio economic background, a place to meet people, …. It can be a park bench, beach, a place of worship, a community garden, a public library, a town square, a hill top, …) Existence of 3rd places is probably why we love certain European cities ? Countries that replace their public spaces for the love of cars and force us to retreat into suburban backyards for solace, make us lonelier by default. Malls make for terrible 3rd spaces. ( Urban activism helps create more 3rd spaces. )
Spend more time with neighbors, friends and family. Volunteer some time on public projects. Smaller my identity, easier it is to solve the problem of consumerism. Larger my identity, easier it is to justify any want as a need and ignore negative externalities. Marketing tricks don’t work on humans with small identity.
Have someone to talk to, about minimalism. Have someone to practice sustainable living with. Tribes help with strength, wellbeing and resilience. After I joined CCL, life became easier. To be surrounded by humans who live simply, makes it easier. I found companionship. If an identity should be formed, let it be centered around sustainable living. “I cant truly wear 20 pairs of shoes. I am not the kind of person who hoards shoes”, is a good script to practice saying to one self.
Sometimes, by helping others, we end up helping ourselves. After a certain point, our success is tied to number of people we help become successful. Help get the Carbon Fee and Dividend act passed. Protest every new fossil fuel expansion scheme.
Am focusing on saving money to buy a home in the future. ( Not an excuse to buy fast fashion. Be frugal, not cheap. )
Beauty is a result of form and elegance with just enough. I think about beauty, a lot. A collection of handbags or shoes or clothes, however gorgeous they are individually, can loose their beauty when they exist in excess. I can not be the one creating an ugly closet with beautiful garments.

Cured and ready, I may never be. But for once, the need for shoes has gone down. 3 pairs were let go. I continue to feel good about it. I have walked away from beautiful shoes since, without feeling the need to fill the newly empty slots. I will try to keep the peace from within.

These subtraction are plenty for now.

Books

We added to the community library in our apartment building.

My partner and I disagree on our library goals and needs. He wants to keep them all, is a maximalist and likes the library-inspired decor. I want negative space and less stuff in general. Only my books get decluttered. His stay. I have learnt to let him be.

Dont Declutter

Letting winter clothes go, in spring. It’s easy to NOT see a need for warm clothes on a sunny day.

Dressy clothes I wore before the lockdown but couldn’t wear during the pandemic.

More shoes. Take it slow.

Textbooks. I am slowly repurchasing physics, chemistry and engineering books from my past. This time, in digital formats.

Avoid any thing that can be done in haste and in bulk. Binge purges don’t necessarily lead to behavior change that lead to minimalism.

Develop the habits first and then downsize in proportion to the progress made.

Some Death Cleaning

Some Buddhist teachings urge you to think about death few times a day. I do now, not because I want to but because I miss the humans we lost. Not contemplating death left me unprepared, betrayed and lost. My puppy will have 10 more years in the most optimistic scenario. My parents might have 10 more years of functional health. I can feel my decay and no longer have the benefits of my youth. My partner might die before I do. All of us have a variable expiration date. Only preparing for the pleasant-to-think-about-scenarios may have ill-prepared me for the realities of life. I have some tasks I am getting through :

Need to write all of Mina’s quirks and training protocols, should her godmother should inherits her from us. Dogs with information and a good story have better chance at being fostered/adopted successfully.

Need to write down memories I have of M, for her kids to read someday.

Stored passwords in files accessible to my partner. Everything from cellphone bill, internet plan, …. loan company logins.

Made a plan for what needs to be done if I need to leave America for good.

Wrote a draft of my will and discussed it with my partner. Need to formalize it.

Made google doc folders with scanned documents for immigration, ids, taxes, insurance documents, etc.

Need to get a life insurance policy that is not tied to my place of employment.

Had a conversation with my parents on their wishes post death.

I am urging my mother to learn family finances so that she is prepared.

Got serious about exercise/healthy diet again, so that my decay isn’t premature and burdensome to my family.

Finances. Am re-thinking my relationship with spending money and who my savings should benefit if I die on net positive wealth. Lately, spending money on fashion given that I have a full closet, feels more unjustified and frivolous. Owning too many shoes after I saw closets of my dead loved ones cleared out, feels vulgar. Not wearing all the clothes I own, feels wasteful. Writing about clothes on a blog, instead of sustainable living feels like wasted potential. Writing about death, feels too personal pushed into a public space. The pandemic did shake me up and I am made different from it.

Remembering Elsa Peretti

Posted on April 19, 2021

My rules of jewelry are simple. Jewelry should resemble gazing at the stars in the sky and being enchanted by the sparkle in the night sky. It should expertly play with the light and never over shine the human wearing it. Station jewelry is my favorite kind. Half the jewelry I own are inspired by her yard necklaces. Her mesh scarf is what I would make my clients wear, if I was a red carpet stylist. Or what I would wear, if I had the money left over to spend, after matters more important to the heart are taken care of. I would wear it wrapped around a cashmere turtleneck in winter, if I could find an affordable brass version. Her lifestyle and creativity inspires me. Her independence and work ethic in-spite of being an heiress, makes me respect her more. This tribute by Kate Young, is a way to remember her by.

Uniform Dressing : Serge Gainsbourg

Posted on April 10, 2021

Serge Gainsbourg died … 30 years ago. Since then, a lot of things have been said about his unique sense of elegance, but the most important point is this: Serge Gainsbourg had style because he truly wore his clothes to death – always the same outfit for near on 20 years. In contrast to his huge musical repertoire, his wardrobe was incredibly refined. Here is the list of the items found inside a few months after his death:⁣
– a couple of denim kecks, both distressed⁣
– five shirts (clad in white, sky blue, and olive green)⁣
– a few V-neck t-shirts that had been cut with scissors (Gainsbourg wore them under his blazers in an illusion that he was bare chested) ⁣
– a pinstripe double breasted blazer⁣
– a perfecto style jacket in exotic leather by Jean-Claude Jitrois⁣
– a peacoat⁣
– twenty pairs of Zizi Repetto shoes, either in white or grey⁣
– a pair of brand new, never worn Flamenco black boots⁣
L’ÉTIQUETTE Magazine.

Style Notes : sweater + maxi dress

Posted on March 29, 2021

Rural land wife. That has always been my association with this look. Not appealing till it suddenly became an aspiration. I want to live on open land with a huge garden with other humans who worship the land. While my current career prospects don’t facilitate such lifestyle, clothes can act as a placeholder for the fantasy.

The woman who wears vintage. I like the off-the-mark worn-in mis-matched pieces that is more of a miss in terms of an outfit in every aspect but the woman seems happy. That is the mindset I am after.

It’s the right outfit for the woman itching to wear dresses again but the weather wouldn’t co-operate.

It’s the right outfit for the woman who likes clothes that pack in the volume.

Two oversized garments paired together can look unflattering. But unflattering for whose eyes ? Mine seem to be finally at peace with it all. Dressing for a lens, biological or artificial, seem to matter less and less these days. My notes :

Stop looking are a reflection. Dont reduce it all to an image. Stop making decisions based on looking in the mirror and through camera lenses. Just wear and go. Compliments are more noise than signal.

Wear a belt on the sweater. Or under the sweater.

Monochrome sweater with printed dress.

Different color sweater with a plain dresses.

No accessories. A maxi dress layered can stand on its own.

A shawl can replace sweater, for when you know for sure that puppy is having a low energy day.

Rain boots under a dress is puppy friendly for long walks.

To make it more structured, pair maxi dress with leather jacket. Or a blazer. But not necessary during the pandemic year. Before the society gets more real again, before the outside voices grow louder again, wear the comfy clothes for as long as possible.

Quotes : Think Little

Posted on March 24, 2021

A better possibility is that the movement to preserve the environment will be seen to be, as I think it has to be, not a digression from the civil rights and peace movements, but the logical culmination of those movements. For I believe that the separation of these three problems is artificial. They have the same cause, and that is the mentality of greed and exploitation. The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities, that imposes on young men the tyranny of the military draft, that makes war against peasants and women and children with the indifference of technology. The mentality that destroys a watershed and then panics at the threat of flood is the same mentality that gives institutionalized insult to black people and then panics at the prospect of race riots. It is the same mentality that can mount deliberate warfare against a civilian population and then express moral shock at the logical consequence of such warfare at My Lai. We would be fools to believe that we could solve any one of these problems without solving the others.
Berry, Wendell. Think Little.

“And our conservationist-environmentalist-moral outrage is often (in its frustration) aimed at the logger or the rancher, when the real power is in the hands of people who make unimaginably larger sums of money, people impeccably groomed, excellently educated at the best universities – male and female alike – eating fine foods and reading classy literature, while orchestrating the investment and legislation that ruin the world.”
Gary Snyder. The Practice of the Wild.

I wish to descend in the social scale. High society is low society. I am a social climber climbing downward. And the descent is difficult.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Fran’s iconic City Lights bookstore owner and poet.

Transparency for Sustainability bloggers

Posted on March 20, 2021

Comforting lies : “Look, I bought my excess from Everlane, Christy Dawn, Doen, second hand market,… Here are the numerous outfits I make on social media.” Unpleasant Truth : “Consume less. From slow fashion brands. Mostly second hand. Wear in. Take care. Mend. Wear out. Upcycle. Compost. Find joy in the process. Cant always be represented as images on social media.”

In the personal sustainability space, there are the priests and the monks. The monks live simply. Priests seem to re-interpret the lives lead by the monks and give advice to citizens trying to do better. The priests put Buddha statues all over their mansion. The monks live simply and don’t collect statues. The priests have their place in the world. However, as a blogger, becoming a priestess is my recurring nightmare. I have deleted 2 blogs so far, as I have realized that I have been preaching what I don’t practice. However, I think it’s alright to keep trying and go as far as I can go (without deleting blogs). Eventually becoming a monk, is a personal goal. Mindfulness training and journalling can help. Sustainability without metrics and lived experience, is meaningless and in danger of becoming overrun by green-washing. In the context of personal closets, I am trying to set some benchmarks for myself. This is an exploratory post.

On keeping a journal

There is no store/Pinterest board/Instagram page /Instagram feed/ runway/fashion museum/… that is as interesting as the spreadsheet of my own closet. This statement would have sounded ridiculous to me, before I started keeping a journal. It was a project I thought I would abandon in a hour or a few days. 2 years later, 99% of the time I would have spent thinking about fashion has been redirected to spending time with my journal. Gratitude and contentment have increased. It’s become easier to switch from explore mode, to exploit mode. From inspiration in shops to perspiration in my own clothes. It’s become easier to talk myself out of purchases because I can not figure out when to wear them, without kicking the elder garments in the face. I have the problem of buying the same thing over and over again with the intent of having abundance of what I like. It’s become easier to find a ceiling on the abundance. One body. 365 days a year. One body shape per decade. My desire to wear favorites, too many times, is strong. There is only so much I can wear. The ceiling is visible now. The fables have become harder to create. The reality has become a place worth living in. Making this one decision to journal, helped making the subsequent 100 everyday decisions easier. It’s nudged from surface level thinking towards system level solutions. This process, has made me very happy.

Tools I used to create the spread sheets : Google image search for photos since my garments are generic enough, email search for purchase confirmation since I do all my shopping online, RealReal search to find similar images, website for background removal. Five hours on a weekend to create the spreadsheet. One minute per day to update the spreadsheet. ( 8 hours making this post. ) I prefer Google spreadsheets because having it online made it easier to update than on a local disk.

Snapshot stats :
74 garments.
28 tops : 8 t-shirts, 11 blouses, 9 shirts
14 dresses : 4 short, 10 midi/maxi.
10 bottons : 5 pants, 5 jeans
13 sweaters. 5 coats. 3 jackets.
4 seasons.

Slow fashion consumed in excess == fast fashion.

In my book of ethics, not reducing consumption and curating the excesses, are in line with the root cause of problems related to sustainability in the wealthier communities. This need for excess made us misunderstand minimalism. Instead of consuming less and needing less, we started throwing out more in the name of decluttering. …… I would have needed a lot more, if I didn’t narrow my gaze with uniform dressing. I would have wanted to try all kinds of trends and cool garments. In my 20s, I wanted a handbag collection, a walk in closet with shoe racks, a large house to store all this stuff, …… the American suburban dream ? I would have found a way to procure them at the cheapest cost to me. The desire was strong, the highs were very high, the subsequent lows were very low. Uniform dressing saved me from the fashion rat race. It helped me calm down and take deeper breaths. Without it, I would have had no success in reducing my needs. Wearing only your most favorite clothes all the time, is the only remedy that I could rationalize. I often get advised to venture outside my style safety zones. I say : I found joy in a slower approach. However, there is a lot of behavioral change I need to work upon. I do not intent to throw away my beautiful garments that I adore and wear, to own less or to make space for the new. It took me years and a lot of resources to build this closet. If I can manage to taper off the new consumption in the years ahead of me, I would be proud of myself. If I am wearing these same garments for the next decade, I will claim the title of sustainable style blogger. The women/men who inspire me are the planet’s great-grand-mothers, grand-mothers and mothers.

Age and lifecycles.

When I buy something, I want to think of how it will serve me over the decade. Lots of these garments don’t make sense or only make sense in the short term, but they should work in the long term. The questions I ask myself when considering a new purchase :

For the sake of sustainability : ” On a scale of 1-300 years of environmental impact, how badly do you want it ? “

For the sake of community : “Am I supporting companies/systems that helps my community? “

For the sake of myself : ” On a scale of 1-10 years, how badly do you need it? “

By journalling, I am making it easier for myself to answer these questions. Humans don’t intuitively do quantitative and long term thinking. It’s possibly why speaking in tonnes of CO2 and 1.5 degrees is often met with blank stares outside climate circles. I am creating the tools I need, to make it possible for me to understand and represent my behavior over the decade. This is transparency, the kind we expect from fashion brands who can easily greenwash their behavior. Buying or not buying is the first step. Keeping for the long haul and continuing to wear it, is rewarded in this process of journaling. If you own as much as I do, I assume there may be similarities in our wear patterns. Maybe we could learn what not to do from my mistakes ? Or use my time spent on making these graphs to think about your own closet stats ?

Wear

Most articles I read on minimalism start with the authors realizing that they wear 20% of their closet 80% of the time. They go on to declutter. In my case, 53% of my closet gets worn 83% of the time. This one chart explains everything about my need, want and greed. The ones I need, get worn a lot and it shows. The black denim. The two navy sweaters. The two blue t-shirts. The one denim dress. The one jacket. The two coats. The ones I want, exist on the graph someplace far behind my needs. The greed shows in the unworn. When I want something new, it’s gotten easier to understand why I don’t need it. The questions to ask :

how many wears do you anticipate this garment to get in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years ?
Do you notice the chunk of clothes that got worn 10 times only ? It would take me about 10 years to get them all into the 100 wears category at my current wear routines and preferences. These are technically new clothes. These are what I need to tap into to shop my closet.
Wears, is a zero sum game in a closet of my size. Any wear I give to this new garment, would come from an older garment getting ignored. What do you intend to wear less of, for the sake of this new garment ?
It’s natural to wear newer garments a lot, as soon as they are purchased. It’s the lust of newness. Do not greenwash your purchases in your mind, by saying “I have been wearing it non stop since I bought it. It was a good purchase”. Unlearn this method of reasoning. Purchases should make sense in the long term. Let’s create new mental models to think about abundance and joy.
Before I started tracking wear, I genuinely thought I was wearing everything all the time. “Hundreds of times”, is something I will never utter frivolously ever again.
A pandemic year is not the time to draw big conclusions. It’s no surprise that the not-so-casual garments have gone untouched and that the t-shirts are raking in the numbers. Let’s do this exercise again after some level of normal has been regained.
I want to aim for wearing 80% of my closet 80% of the time. The 20% accent pieces can wait their turn and stay in my closet for years.
If you are a blogger who writes reviews, I need to know that you really wear your clothes into the ground. The number of years owned is a poor substitute to wear count, because it’s easy to hoard unused goods in wealthier communities. When I see new looking garments being held up and labeled as “feels like good quality”, I don’t trust the review at all. Would you expect me to know intimate details of a garment I wore a few times and then trust me with your money ? I want to review goods I buy. I need to do this exercise of recording wear.
If you are of this world, you probably are attuned to the world of incentives and rewards. Novel things come with their set of rewards : people gushing over your purchase, hormone spikes, more outfits, more choices, more distraction, …. Wearing the old things for the 100th time don’t often come with rewards. If you brag about it on your blog, they will call you out for virtue signaling. There are not many incentive systems in place for sustainable behavior. It’s often a tree in a forest you never visited growing unharmed, people you have never met having tad cleaner water, children who aren’t your own breathing less pollutants, farmers who can count on the rains to irrigate their fields, ….. so abstract, too little to take credit for, too little to believe you had an impact, and impossible to pin point. Probably why environmental justice is such a hard to talk about. A wear journal is the one place you get rewarded. You get to add plus one and smile. The garment stayed loyal to you once more. You stayed loyal to the garment once more. Reward yourself. Be proud. Make art about it.
When the measure, becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure. (The Cobra Effect). I do not think the number of clothes owned, should be the sole metric that measures a mind-in-training to want less. How I react to stress, loneliness, boredom, sorrow, happiness, desire, creative expression, need for dopamine hits, need for adrenaline highs, ability to understand delayed gratification, etc should also be measured. The internal metrics are harder for me to talk about on the internet. The external metrics like consumption/purging are a result of the internal metrics. I hope they will do, for now. However inadequate, a measure must exist.

Future subsections to expand into :

Clothes & their mends.

Ecological footprint of my clothing. ( Each garment should come with a label like how food has nutrition values.)

Brands I repurchase from and admire.

Circularity of my garments. ( 8 years away from this post.)

Number of garments getting culled every year.

Define incentive/reward for behaving responsibly.

Philosophy of Money / Home economics.

Mindfulness training. ( External metrics are easier to record. Internal metrics are above my pay grade to write about. )

More reading : Lin’s post on her logs. M Get’s Dressed wrote a post on Wardrobe Tracking.