10.25.2024 Tidying Up   Over the summer, I found myself faced with the challenge of tidying up my humble 650 sq. ft. home, which had accumulated 15 years’ worth of clutter. When I first moved into this small but wonderful space, I had already read Marie Kondo’s renowned book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and its sequel, which teaches her famed organizing method of going through your belongings and keeping only what “sparks joy.” Despite my knowledge of her method, my “stuff” still piled up over the years. Too much, it seemed, sparked joy for me — especially when an IKEA opened in my neighborhood in 2017, filled with colorful things I just had to take home. In the heat of the summer, I’d had enough of the clutter. My unfinished basement had filled up with old furniture and pretty boxes I accumulated throughout the years, molding under the season’s humidity. My living space had also become full of things I wasn’t necessarily using or even appreciating. While digging through the clutter, I found a copy of the late Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Making Space. Freshly inspired, I was excited to clean up and make space for a meditation corner, hoping to turn my small home into a peaceful retreat. But it turned out to be far from easy — I am my mother’s daughter, after all. I come from a family that was influenced by the custom of feeling mottainai — a sense of regret over letting anything go to waste, which most post-war parents in Japan were taught. Older generations that grew up influenced by this concept find Kondo’s all-or-nothing style daunting, perhaps even severe — quite different from her cheerful smile. Many start reading her books only to give up after a few chapters. My mother, for example, loves to keep pretty wrapping paper, ribbons, and boxes to reuse for gift-wrapping. The problem is, she’s never come up with a savvy way to make use of them. Neither have I, unlike Ruth Ozeki, who discusses her great approach to repurposing inconvenient but important items as an artist in her piece “Nothing is Wasted.” Interestingly, as Cristina Moon discusses in “Zen and the Way of Tidying,” Kondo’s method isn’t just about tidying, but rather serves as a philosophy for approaching life itself. Her approach gives people like my mother and me a kinder, more enjoyable path to decluttering that can also be applied to our hearts and minds. The idea is to thank items before letting them go if they no longer bring joy — a concept that can feel revolutionary to those who, like my mother’s generation, carry a lot of guilt over throwing things away. But a clear space can also lead to a clear mind, which allows us to better ourselves and the world around us as a result. Inspired by the three stories below, I’m planning my own tidy-up festival this weekend. While my home isn’t quite decluttered yet, I’m on my way to creating the peaceful space I’ve envisioned, thanking all I choose to let go of along the way. —Megumi Yoshida, Art Director, Lion’s Roar Zen and the Way of Tidying   Marie Kondo’s philosophy of tidying is sweeping the globe. If you take the fad seriously, writes Cristina Moon, it can offer a glimpse of the profound. Anyone who has tried the KonMari Method knows that it can be deeply challenging. When you Google “I tried KonMari,” three of the top results are “I Tried The KonMari Method And My Head Basically Exploded,” “I Tried KonMari and I Hated It,” and “I Tried the ‘kon-mari’ Method of Tidying Up and Was Left Feeling Empty”. As I tell beginning meditators and Zen students all the time, this stuff is hard. When you empty your mind for even a moment, subconscious materials begin to surface, some of which we would rather avoid. In tidying, you confront your effects — in both senses of the word. It’s the books and clothes that have piled up. And it’s the people, the choices, and the limitations in how you think. ADVERTISEMENT Nothing Is Wasted If you use your difficulties to create art, says Ruth Ozeki, it will give them meaning.   I started writing novels about the difficult situations in my life. When I was confused about workplace ethics, or sad about the deaths of my parents, or angry about corporate malfeasance, or anxious about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, I used the long process of writing stories or novels to sit with my discomfort and investigate it deeply. I’d ask myself questions: What does this feeling feel like? What kinds of stories am I telling myself? What would that person think or do? What would it feel like to be inside his mind? Her skin? Writing is not unlike meditation in this way. In meditation, you become intimate with your stories in order to see through them and let them go. In writing, you become intimate with your stories in order to let them go, too. But first you must capture them and make them concrete. Do Dishes, Rake Leaves: The Wisdom of the Ancient Homemakers Karen Maezen Miller on how the domestic practice of ancient Zen masters can lead us to intimate encounters with our own lives.   At the moment that I’m raking leaves, at the moment I’m doing anything, it is my life, it is all of time, and it is all of me. In the spring, the garden bursts to life and once again I see what time it is. It is time to weed. When I look up across the endless stretch of the job before me, I surely want to quit. But if I manage to regain my focus on what’s at hand I realize it’s just one weed. There’s always just one weed to do next. I do it weed by weed, and the weeds always show me how. I never finish.