Not Minimal and Not Simple

There is a movement afoot in the world which I have tried to avoid writing about for fear of seemingly to be uncharacteristically bitchy (shut up). It is the movement towards simpliclity of living, which is paired with a desire to use the earth's resources responsibly or minimally, and morphs at one extreme into a desire to live as minimally as possible. I am not going to reference it because I do actually like the woman who writes the blog which spurred me on to writing this post. I was re-reading one of the woman's posts, in which she talks about her long-standing desire to live as simply as possible, with as little as possible and she describes what her ideal possessions and living space would be like. She says that she wants to be able to live so that all her possessions fit into one medium-sized suitcase. She calmly avoids the fact that she lives in a shared household and eats shared meals off shared plates, because she believes that they don't belong to her, they belong to the house. Where I really lost sympathy for her position is when she said that in her ideal world scenario she wouldn't need to have plates and bowls at all because she could buy a salad from Marks and Spencer and reuse the bowl it came in.
It was the specificity of the salad from Marks and Spencer which did it. You see, the simple life, or minimal life comes horrendously expensive, and that is the first thing which is wrong with this world view. The people who talk about ethics in their consumption are the ones with th money to make choices and choose the relatively more expensive options of organic and so on. The option to live like that is also a privilege of the rich: the poor, the really poor, the people caught in poverty traps which they can't get out of, want more, would dearly love more, and their lifestyle choices tend to be characterised by choosing more over choosing quality. Of course this is a huge generalisation but my gander is up and I think it is a generalisation which in general terms will stand.
The quest for simplicity and being 'right-sized' sounds like a highly moral one, but it also has its dangers, and these are inherent in the relentless pursuit of smallness. I may be overstating it, but the pursuit of smallness leads as its natural conclusion to anorexia. I mean that quite seriously. I don't want to lead a life where I spend my time taking up as little as possible, I want to lead a life where my place is the right size for me and I can enjoy abundance without it infringing on anyone else. I mean that word abundance in deadly earnest, incidentally. What doesn't impress me about contrived minimalism is that it is another ridiculously expensive and consuming way of life. In my own situation it makes good economic sense to have enough clothes so that I can run the washing machine only when it is full and enough plates and pots that I can run the dishwasher only when it is full. To do otherwise is ridiculous.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want a life of conspicuous over-consumption: in fact a considerable number of my possessions are second-hand and a lot of my clothes have holes in. I periodically have a clear out and get rid of stuff which no longer serves me. My motivation in that is purely so as not to go through life encumbered with lots of stuff I am keeping just in case, which was very much my mother's modus vivandi. Magically, having a clean out is a great tradition, a wonderful way of clearing up ones space, and recently I have even thrown out The List and my collection of newspaper articles about rapists and what have you, which used to reside on the altar. I instinctively felt that it was time to change and move on to a new phase. In case you're wondering what I did with the cuttings was simply put them in the bin. This may seem somewhat unmagical but that was what felt right, so that the Goddess can continue to attend to these people in the rubbish dump. I just don't want a load of clutter in my life and have got rid of a lot more things which don't serve me.
My daily tarot card today is the Fool. I am intrigued by the way that that card just keeps on giving no matter how often I draw it. One of the things about him is of course that he is carrying a staff with a kerchief thingy containing, presumably his few belongings. I drew this card using my old faithful Morgan-Greer deck, which despite being my second copy of that deck is beginning to look a bit elderly, not least because I have written on it; Etteilla's keywords on the card front, and Liber T keywords and comments from Waite on the back. I was especially intrigued to see that Waite's comment on the Fool is that this card reverses all the confusions which have preceded it, exactly a statement of what I want my life to be at the moment. I was trying to think about a word to describe how I would like that life to be, especially in the light of the Golden Dawn's design of the Fool, a child holding a wolf's leash between a yellow rose bush. I thought first of the clarity with which children can think, without the confusing layers of interpretation and convention we adults develop. The word I thought of was simplicity, but I don't like that word for what I want in my life, because for me it has too many connotations of a contrived decorative simplicity. Minimalism is out for the same reason. Intentionality is another word with too many existing connotations, although frankly I have given up the attempt to find a word which hasn't been used by the rest of the English-speaking world before I can get to it.
Regular readers will know that I have a great admiration for the concept of plainness: plain speaking, thinking, dressing, living, although this word tends to be co-opted by the Quakers and while I find individual Quakers admiral I find I tend to dislike the actual culture of Quakerism which has its own politics and grows disproportionately powerful 'heavy Friends'. Regular readers will know that I detest the very concept of 'spirituality', no matter how well meant as implying a divorce from the embodied world, which is where I want my 'spirituality' to manifest. Thus I don't want a word for my approach which implies that it is a spiritual thing alone. And then the word 'singleness' struck me.
It chimes with the monastic tradition, and yet this singleness is about as magical a word as you can get. In all magical traditions there is a sense of focusing on your will, and this failure to think singly is the cause of a lot of failure in magic. For the hedge-witch the word has a special significance as implying the venerable tradition of the witch living alone, working alone, being singled out, and all that jazz.
I am very gratified to have found a word to describe how I want my life to be. Of course finding my one true will and doing it and nothing else will require more work. I feel I am edging towards it by the way so much dross is being cast out of my life, and when I find out what it is no doubt I will post it here...