Bedouin tent, Wadi Rum, Jordan “The world is a book. People who don’t travel read only one page.” ––St. Augustine 138 days. That’s how long we spent on a ship traveling around the world this year. This was not our first extended rodeo, mind you. It’s our third. (You can read about our last global adventure five years ago in my “Love Letter to the World” here.) As much as I’d like to think I’ve got this travel thing down, reentry does not get easier. Not when you come home five months later so utterly filled up and expanded by the experience. So how does one begin to unpack it all? (And I ..read more

No time to slow down? Q: You talk a lot about the importance of slowing down. But I don’t have time to slow down. I need help clearing fast! How do I effectively use your programs when I need to tackle things more quickly? SBV: “Tackle” is not where it’s at with this work. And you cannot rush letting go. Sorry. We need to go slow to go fast. If this seems contradictory, let me explain: We cannot release stress and clutter when we are in a constant state of alert and overwhelm. Sure, you can go on a clearing binge of your living spaces and see where it gets you. In the end you mi ..read more

If I were to summarize my goals in space clearing in the simplest possible way, it would like this: to raise the frequencies of light in ways that people can integrate, and get out of the way. In other words, to love things up and detach from the outcome. If that sounds a bit woo-woo, think of a light on a dimmer switch. Anything you do in your home with awareness and compassionate detachment – whether it is clearing out a drawer, putting the dishes away, taking out the trash – turns up the light. Leading with the heart (and less head) shifts the energy. Truly. Though subtle, if you were ..read more

“Instead of thinking about the myriad negative feelings you want to avoid and the myriad things you can buy or do in service of that, think about a single organizing principle that is highly effective at generating positive feelings across the board: Shift your focus outward.” –Sigal Samuel Is it too late to wish you all a Happy New Year? With the culmination of a much anticipated wedding in my family, I feel like I’ve spent the past couple of months floating in some kind of alternate universe. Yes, after two years of extensive planning and one postponement due to the pandemic, our daughter ..read more

“…an old No Fear ad campaign says, ‘the one who dies with the most toys still dies.’ But instead of heeding this simple wisdom, we continue filling our pockets with rocks and walking, quite happily, into ever deeper water.” –Edward Readicker-Henderson, How to Get Rid of Stuff We did it! We emptied our entire attic. We have not seen it this way since we moved into the house over 27 years ago. It took us about five weekend days, spread out over 2+ months. If we’d wanted to keep living in our 1875 home with poor insulation and no chance of upgrading to a more eco-friendly heating and ..read more

“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” –Mary Oliver No, I don’t plan to talk about Moveable Feast – the book in the photo – which I’ve never read and don’t plan to. Along with a slew of other books, we donated it to our local library in last month’s massive round of decluttering. What I want to share with you instead is a different kind of moveable feast: a new-found love, passion project, and daily practice of sorts – courtesy of a free mobile app a friend told me about called “1 Second Everyday.” This tool allows you capture and record your life in ..read more

[To remember]: At its essence, it means to call back all of our ‘members’ — those aspects in ourselves that we’ve neglected or have scattered or gone missing — and return to the truth of who we are. –A Year to Clear My matchbook collection dating back to 1970 (before pruning) My husband and I have spent most of a month going through years (read: decades) of stuff — some of it squirreled in the darkest recesses of our attic, some of it hiding in plain sight. This latest round of clutter clearing was prompted out of necessity: a need to prepare the attic (read: empty it completely) for a messy ..read more

It all began with a wonder question posed by my husband as we contemplated what to do with the cluttered bookcase that takes up an entire wall in our 1875 home: Why would we keep a book? This question was quickly followed by another: Do we really need to own it? Hmm, I’d never thought of starting a project like that, but that’s how this latest round of decluttering began. We could have followed Marie Kondo’s directives of moving all the books to the floor, holding each one, and asking if it sparks joy. What we opted for instead was my slower, Spacious Way approach, supported by the list o ..read more

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” –Henry David Thoreau. It’s not every day that you get invited to sign copies of one of your books at ground zero of the simplicity movement: Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. It is here where, in 1845, Henry David Thoreau lived intentionally for two years, two months, and two days. (And PS, can I say, it’s as if he never left. His presence is still ..read more

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” –Henry David Thoreau. It’s not every day that you get invited to sign copies of one of your books at ground zero of the simplicity movement: Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. It is here where, in 1845, Henry David Thoreau lived intentionally for two years, two months, and two days. (And PS, can I say, it’s as if he never left. His presence is still so very much alive and pal ..read more