Where can you reduce clutter in your life?

Where can’t I reduce clutter around me? Clutter is all around me.

At my old apartment whom I used to share with my now husband, we used to have this corner we would pile all our unused clutter in and we termed it, “The Corner.” We even joked about putting Xmas lights on it one year since our place was too small to have a Xmas tree. Another time I suspected a hobo lived in there and one day a stranger would just get out from under the pile, head to the kitchen, grab a snack and walk out our front door. Maybe he’d take some of the stuff with him too.

Our pile of clutter was always in flux, thinned out perhaps every once a year to make room for the seasons’s latest crop of paintings, or pandemic nursing supplies, or the bed bug fiascos of 2006 and 2013, when we toss most of it out. It was a pile of crap that reflected the current moment of our lives. It marked the pivotal happy time in our lives as well, my wedding dress entered the pile in 2016, uncomfortable dress shoes for those important occasions, a degree in fine art- which I later sold for $10 CAD, then a degree in nursing, now irrelevant because the university decided to change it’s name. The corner even marked major political shifts of the current day.

Since moving into our home and effectively de-cluttering, it inevitably piles back up with two kids, a painting career, and a talented husband with multiple hobbies. Clutter corners are all around us, they are in our closets, the counter tops, hidden in between all the nooks and crannies, just overflowing enough to acknowledge, but not enough to have to do anything about. “It’s not jut junk! but the treasures that we carry that tell the stories of our lives.” is what someone with a hoarding problem might say.

#clutter #squirrel #hoarder

What is your mission?

To safeguard the realm of freedom of thought and expression, to excel and fascinate, through painting!

A little bit about me..

I am a child of Chinese immigrant parents who came from China and Hong Kong in the 70s. Their past and upbringing was riffed with a hardship they never talk about, but I do know they worked hard to get here to Canada, to enjoy the freedoms that we do.

I grew up in a strict household with a tight schedule of extra homework and logistically practical lessons to build me up for survival, none of them made to be very fun. My parents never wanted to go back to their old life and wanted to be sure my brother and I would be set up with a successful one, I can’t blame them.

Despite all that, Art has always been an outlet for me, a pillar to my being, a way to be true in the world, a place to express myself and have some fun, so when this organization approached me with the project, I couldn’t say no.

Rights and freedoms must be exercised to be protected. These are civil liberties the majority of us don’t think about much on the day to day, but people have died to enjoy these freedoms, and I don’t take them for granted.

It is a children’s story about how naturalized gardens came to be legal in Canada, and how they came to be a protected right to freedom of expression. The story interested me in that I’ve seen naturalized gardens all around my neighbourhood, it wasn’t something I thought was ever illegal. They seem harmless enough, and are likely better for the environment, but individuals had to fight for that right, and in the end they won, under the premise of freedom expression, which really is the search for truth. You can’t seek truth if you don’t protect the freedom to think, act and express. This is how we learn to get along with one another, to solve the world’s biggest problems, by not being afraid, to tackle the unknown head-on, to have the ability to ask those uncomfortable questions.

The book is projected to finish by late February. I invite you to explore the CCF, defending the rights and freedoms of all Canadians, here is their website:

https://theccf.ca

#childrensbook #freedomofexpression