Making space and recalling memories.

The bin men came this morning and they took about 5 bin liners of rubbish which I have been sorting out recently.  There is still more to go, and I have filled another bin liner today with stuff I really just don't need; and looking at it I can't quite understand why I have been keeping it all these years.

I went through all my old film photographs and their negatives and have chucked a lot of them.  Rubbish photos, so why keep them?  Mind you one thing that photographs do it to bring back a moment in time in a very unique way.  Truly a 'snap shot' of a moment.  I can remember were I was and what the weather was like in some cases.  One of my favourite photos is of Waylands Smithy(see left), a neolithic megalithic monument.  I remember the first time I walked out there, and how it seemed to be so far from the car park, how hot the day was, how dusty the ancient trackway that runs by it was, and how wonderfully cooling it was to be in the shade of the trees.  I love the way I managed to get a photo with the shadow of a tree branch going into the chamber.  It was quiet there and I was able to just wander around taking in the atmosphere of the place, and the magic of the moment as there is something so special about these monuments.  There are also a load of photos of Stonehenge as the sun came up on the Summer Solstice.  I remember walking along the road from the field where I was parked with a low pink tinged mist clinging to the ground with barrows sticking out of it every now and then.  I remember how warm the morning was when the sun came up, despite the earliness of the hour.

Ridding myself of unwanted things is something that I am finding quite liberating at the moment.  I have to strike while the iron is hot because when I am not in the right frame of mind I dither and then end up hanging on to too many things.  At the moment I feel the need to get rid of a lot of the junk which is cluttering up my life; things that really are blocking my existence rather than letting my life flow.  I feel the need to let go of some of the dreams that I have hung on to over the years, and replace them with memories that really matter and which remind me of what I do have, not what I wanted to have in my life.  Personally my Stage IV diagnosis has really helped me to do this.  It really made me focus on the present rather than regretting what didn't happen in the past, and the future that has yet to come.  I don't have time to waste on dreams, but I do have all the time in the world for special memories.