Card: Simplify

Landscape: Self/Immediate Environment

Title of Painting: Online

Interpretation: Life has become complicated and you may be feeling like your things own you, instead of you owning your things. You are working for their care and tending when it should be the other way around. Sylvia Townsend Warner tells us "It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies." This is a time to reflect and ask yourself: What can be released? What is unnecessary? What remains? Place the things you value at the center of your life. Then make their nourishment, attention, and stewardship the business of your everyday living. Everything else is dust. Strip yourself. Shed downward. Get low. Remember you are Earth.

Deeper Resonance: This image appears again and again in my work. For me, it is a meditation on simple living, right-relationship, and working in harmony with nature.

Recommended Reading:
Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy by Sarah Ban Breathnach