The Souls of Things: Decluttering and Disposal as Sacred Acts
I am a person who finds letting go of things, decluttering, to be difficult.
One thing that has helped me to declutter is learning more about the Shintō-based perspectives of Marie Kondō, who wrote The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up, and who is now on Netflix; and of Nagisa Tatsumi, the decluttering expert who inspired Kondō.
Another thing that has helped me to declutter is to dig into the Western religious roots of disposing of ritual objects.
Seeing human-made objects as alive in the Shintō-based sense that Kondō writes about, made me think of why I keep or let go of my things, in a whole new way. Furthermore, religious traditions have rituals for disposing of sacred objects that are worn out or being de-sanctified (e.g. selling a church building). As a clergywoman, I perform the priestly function of leading rituals. At home, this knowledge of the healing power of ritual also helps me to let go of things.
Western culture teaches us that things are inanimate; yet our things are charged emotionally. We project ourselves into our things in all kinds of ways. Brand loyalty says something about who you are, as a person. (Mac or PC? Does it really matter? If you’re sputtering now, “OH YES it DOES,” your device is emotionally charged by your values and preferences.)
Things can also have deep associations with people who are important to us. (”This belonged to my grandfather.”) Or things can be connected with certain times of our lives (”oh, this came from the cabin we used to go to”).
Or we can feel a general responsibility for taking care of things by saving them, preserving them for the future, or if nothing else, from the landfill. (I’ll have a lot more to say about that, below.)
Your things may be inanimate, but your emotions and memories and associations with those things are very much alive. Your things are alive to you in a way they will not be to anyone else. I have a baby quilt, made by a family friend, that belonged to my daughter. She doesn’t want it, because she doesn’t remember it. I do; so I am keeping it. When I am no longer alive, it will be just a random, faded old quilt; something our kids will have to dispose of. It may well go to a landfill. Most textiles do.
But what if our feelings for our things, are returned? What if our things have hopes and feelings and associations about us?
Let’s play a game: What if your things have lives and feelings of their own?
Let’s play a game.
What if your things have souls of their own, a kind of life of their own? Not human-like lives, like Mrs. Potts of Disney fame (who was, after all, a human transformed into a thing), but their own thing-y kinds of lives?
If we play this particular game, of decluttering our things because in some sense they are alive, it’s important that we do not consider things to have human-like lives, or human desires.
No; they have thing-lives, and as things, their wants differ from ours.
My two cats want catnip mice. I do not. Humans and cats are different.
Let’s imagine that things also want different things; and their lifespans are made complete, fulfilled, in different ways from ours.
What if what your things want most, is to be used? For Marie Kondō, things desire our use and appreciation of them:
Pause to say ‘thank you’ to the clothes you are wearing, to your pen or computer, your dishes and quilts, the bath and the kitchen. Without exception, the things in your home long to make you happy. (…) they are there to protect and support you (…) (Kondō and Hirano 2016, p 265)
What if things live to be used? What if a great life for a thing, let’s say, a coffee cup, is to be used appreciatively and often, in a relationship with a human, and then respectfully discarded?
Some Shintō-inspired Perspectives on How Things Are Alive
Shintō is not my tradition, and I know very little about it.
Marie Kondō, however, served as a Shintō shrine maiden for five years (Kondō and Hirano 2014, p 160). And the woman who wrote the book on decluttering that inspired Kondō, Nagisa Tatsumi, wrote this:
[it is] a mistaken belief that not throwing something away is the same as taking good care of it. (bolding mine) (…) A genuine tradition (…) relates to spirits called Tsukumo-gami. These were said to enter old, abandoned implements and stir them up to mischief, their message being: “Don’t leave things unused!” My own feeling is that people in the past were more sensitive when it came to discarding things than we are today. They were sensitive to the souls of things, to their essence (mottai), so they felt it was a waste (mottai-nai) not to use things that could be used. Then, when they stopped using them, they’d discard them completely and decisively. This is reflected in the Hari-kuyo ceremony—a requiem-type service for old needles that is still held at some temples in Japan. My belief now is the same as it was when I first wrote this book: complete and decisive disposal is of fundamental importance. (Tatsumi and Turvill 2017, Kindle locations 149, 156)
Folks, I am a saver. One of the major difficulties I have with decluttering is that my default is to save something, not to discard it “completely and decisively,” as Tatsumi recommends.
But what if saving something without using it, is NOT taking good care of it?
What if the nicest, kindest thing you can do for an object in your home, a thing that has a thing-y life of its own, is to ensure that it gets used up?
If you’re not actively using something, what if the right thing to do — if things have thing-y lives of their own — is either to pass it along; or respectfully say goodbye to it, and dispose of it?
When a friend and her husband had a health scare, they got rid of the old plastic dinner plates they had been using for thirty years. They began using their wedding china that they had been “saving,” for their daily meals. “Who cares if something breaks?” she said to me. “It’s beautiful, and finally we’re using and enjoying it.”
Maybe the wedding china is happier being used and enjoyed, than it was sitting silent and untouched in a cupboard for thirty years.
What if things need light, and air, and use, and enjoyment from people, to fully thrive?
What if, for a thing, it’s kind of like being put into a coma, to be stashed, unused, in the back of a closet? It’s never enjoyed and appreciated, never brought out on thing-y adventures; but left to lie neglected, in the dark.
Things stored out of sight are dormant. This makes it much harder to decide whether they inspire joy or not. By exposing them to the light of day and jolting them alive, so to speak, you’ll find it’s surprisingly easy to judge whether they touch your heart. (Kondō and Hirano 2014, p. 44)
What if our household things don’t want to be saved? What if things would rather be used and related to, and involved in humans’ lives, than left untouched in a dark closet?
Marie Kondō suggested clapping three times to wake up your books when you take them from the shelves and sort them. This also comes from the Shintō tradition. Margaret Dilloway wrote eloquently about how Westerners misunderstood Kondō’s Shintō-based perspectives:
My late Japanese mother married an American in 1958, and despite her insistence that her children not speak Japanese for fear people would think we were foreign, she never gave up her Japanese religion. As the daughter of a priest in the Konko Church, she eschewed the Latter-Day Saints of my father and practiced a Shinto mindset, stubbornly and daily, alone at our home.
“Clap three times,” she instructed me, “so the kami know you’re here.”
Kami are Shinto spirits present everywhere — in humans, in nature, even in inanimate objects. At an early age, I understood this to mean that all creations were miracles of a sort. I could consider a spatula used to cook my eggs with the wonder and mindful appreciation you’d afford a sculpture; someone had to invent it, many human hands and earthly resources helped get it to me, and now I use it every day. (Dilloway 2019)
In her books, Kondō frequently observes that we grow by being in dialogue with our things. By consciously choosing and using our things, and intentionally letting go of the ones we are no longer using, we grow in self-awareness, and in respect for the world around us.
Disposing of Things as a Sacred Rite
In the United States, culturally, we do have a few physical objects that are considered alive, such as a U.S. flag:
The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing … The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning. (Flag Code, Section 8)
It is not considered respectful to display a U.S. flag in tatters. Worn out U.S. flags are properly disposed of in retirement ceremonies.
We have another category of things that are deliberately, respectfully discarded when they are worn out: scrolls and books that carry religious scriptures.
It is disrespectful to continue using a ritual object when it is irretrievably stained, torn or worn. So these objects can be disposed of, in ways that honor their symbolic meaning.
Torah scrolls could be buried in the ground. Worn-out Bibles traditionally were burned or buried. Tim Challies, a Christian blogger and writer, must get a lot of questions about disposing of worn-out Bibles, because on his site he appears to have addressed this a couple of times:
…disposing of an old Bible is not diminishing the value of Scripture. There is no need for fear or superstition. There is nothing objectively wrong with disposing of an old Bible. You can simply put it in your recycling bin or even in the trash. Throw it out respectfully (don’t toss it out a car window or make a show of destroying it) but dispose of it without fear that you’ve committed a terrible sin. (Challies, 2012)
I want to make three points about all this:
1) In the life of a sacred object, there is a proper time to dispose of it. It is less respectful to keep a flag or a scriptural text that is stained, ripped, damaged; than it is to respectfully dispose of it. The symbolism supersedes the object. If we care about the meaning of a flag, or if we care about the meaning of a canonical text, then we do not house sacred symbols in dirty, damaged objects. (The exception would be if a flag or a bible also had deep historic or sentimental significance in addition; e.g. the actual flag that inspired the Star Spangled Banner; or an old family bible with special inscriptions in it.) Honoring the meaning that the object houses, is more important than the transient object that houses it. What makes disposing of something charged with symbolism into a respectful act, is doing it with a ritual — applying your attention and your words — to accompany the act. When you acknowledge and appreciate the meaning, the role, of something in your life, that is what makes disposing of something respectful. For a household object, a farewell ritual can be as simple as saying, “I loved using you, thank you for being in my household,” before throwing something away.
2) Our ancestors did not have city dumpsters, trash cans, or garbage trucks. ALL of their discarded things ended up being either buried, burned, or thrown into a midden pile. (Fun fact: I found old patent medicine bottles in a 19th century household dump in the woods behind the New England farmhouse I grew up in.) Disposing of an object by burning or burying it is not inherently holier than recycling something or putting it in a trash can. It is not about the method of disposal: it is about taking a moment to acknowledge the meaning of the object being disposed of. From Kondō and Tatsumi we can learn to treat our ordinary household things as sacred objects, and our homes as sacred space. And they are. They protect and house YOU. And that is sacred too!
3) Rituals help us say good-bye. (This is what funerals are all about…) When you no longer use something, you can take a moment to remember how you enjoyed it, you can thank the item for the way the item protected you from the weather or made you more comfortable in your home, and then you can donate it, recycle it, or throw it in the trash. Religious traditions have always had rites for disposing of things that are no longer in a condition to honor what they represent, primarily by using our words to recognize the impact of what we are saying goodbye to. To say “thank you” to an object is a great way to do just that.
It’s also hard to declutter, because disposing of things has increasingly come to be seen as secular sin. Perhaps it is out of concern for the environment that people are reluctant to discard things, struggling to keep things out of landfills. And we should rightfully be concerned about the environment.
But your house should not be a landfill, either. Your house is not — and cannot function as — a sin-eater for humanity’s environmental sins. Your keeping too many things in your house — things you neither use nor enjoy — will not save the environment at large. But it may well affect your own personal environment, your own well-being. Conversely, by letting things go, your home could inspire others to see how to live better, more contentedly, with fewer things, but things you really love and enjoy.
Marie Kondō often makes this point about her tidying method: when people see the sheer volume of things they have accumulated, before they go through the discarding process, this sharply raises their awareness about consumption. Afterwards they accumulate much less.
Not disposing of things out of environmental guilt will not improve your future consumption patterns, especially if you are repeatedly buying things you have, but cannot find; nor will it actually even help the environment (I have witnessed enough estate sales and house clean-outs to know how much goes into the landfill, in the end).
It is the production and purchase of new things that has the biggest impact on the environment. Consciously, regularly, and intentionally disposing of things we do not use, keeps us mindful about acquiring only what we plan to use in the future.
My goal for my home is to have no more in it, than I can take good care of and use, respectfully and well. For me, the difficult process of decluttering has required at least as much awareness, reflection, repentance, and resolve, as any formal spiritual discipline I have tried.
Saying Goodbye, with Thanks, to My Favorite Coffee Cup
My sister gave me my favorite coffee cup, many years ago. It was large, so I didn’t have to refill it every five minutes. (I drink a LOT of coffee in the morning.) It was cream-colored ceramic, with a simple and rather whimsical design. It was the cup I reached for, over and over.
No herbal tea in this baby.
About a month ago, I noticed that I was no longer feeling happy using it. The design had faded. It had scuff marks I could no longer scrub off, and dings all over it. I never pulled it out of the cupboard to give to visitors anymore, because it looked so dingy.
When my sister had given it to me, one of the things I loved was how fresh and clean it looked — it reminded me of her, and of her house, which always feels light and fresh to me. But now it just made me feel depressed. And that is not how I want to feel about my things, and certainly not how my sister wanted me to feel, when she gave it to me. She gave it to me because she believed it would make me happy. And it did, for many years.
My instinct would be to hold onto that cup, because technically it could still hold coffee. Or pencils! Or beads! But it still would have depressed me to look at it. This worn-down coffee cup was telling me its thingy-life was over.
Marie Kondō’s and Nagisa Tatsumi’s perspectives helped me let this coffee cup go, and give the other cups in the cupboard more space, and more opportunities for them to be enjoyed. I told the coffee cup how much I appreciated using it, and how it reminded me of my sister for many years, and I thanked it, and respectfully discarded it. Yes, I felt a little silly, a little awkward doing this; but I also felt better.
It was not a Hari-kuyo ceremony like Nagisa Tatsumi described above, or a flag retirement ceremony, but it had the spirit of those: taking a moment to verbalize what this object meant for me. I expressed my appreciation for my sister, for the cup itself, and for the happiness they brought me, as I held the cup for the last time. And that did make it easier to let it go.
Personally, I prefer to live in a world that is more alive than not. I prefer to live in a world that is charged with more spiritual power than not. I prefer to live with more of a sense of reverence, more of a sense that every thing and every place has potential to be sacred; than not.
And that means recognizing my connection with other lives, through the objects I buy and own, use and discard: whether they are the lives of the human designers and makers and shippers of these objects, or the lives of plants and animals in the natural world that are affected by the making of these objects.
My sense of connection is deepened even more, when I choose to live as though my household things themselves are enspirited in some sense; first by being created by other human beings, all over the world; and next becoming spiritually charged by my using these things, being in dialogue with them, as Kondō puts it.
Perhaps things do have a life of their own; and they are most alive, when they are most enjoyed and used.
And when we no longer want to use them, or when they are all used up, perhaps the best thing to do, to honor their thing-y lives with us, is to kindly and respectfully let them go.
Copy and share - the link is here. If you’d like to subscribe via newsletter or RSS, you can do that here.
References
Kondō, M. and Hirano, C. (2014) The life-changing magic of tidying up: the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing. First American edition. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.
Kondō, M. et al. (2016) Spark joy: an illustrated master class on the art of organizing and tidying up. First American edition. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.
Tatsumi, N. and Turvill, A. (2017) The art of discarding: how to get rid of clutter and find joy. New York: Hachette Books. Kindle edition.
Dilloway, What White, Western Audiences Don’t Understand About Marie Kondo’s ‘Tidying Up’ (2019) HuffPost. Available at: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marie-kondo-white-western-audineces_n_5c47859be4b025aa26bde77c (Accessed: 24 January 2022).
How to Properly Dispose of Worn-Out U.S. Flags (no date) U.S. Department of Defense. Available at: https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/Story/Article/2206946/how-to-properly-dispose-of-worn-out-us-flags/ (Accessed: 2 February 2022).
Flag code: U.S.C. Title 4 - FLAG AND SEAL, SEAT OF GOVERNMENT, AND THE STATES (no date). Available at: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2011-title4/html/USCODE-2011-title4-chap1.htm (Accessed: 3 February 2022).
Challies, T. (2 October 2012) ‘How Do I Dispose of a Bible? | Tim Challies’, https://www.challies.com/. Available at: https://www.challies.com/articles/how-do-i-dispose-of-a-bible/ (Accessed: 3 February 2022).
‘Sin-eater’ (2021) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sin-eater&oldid=1060964184 (Accessed: 3 February 2022).