I am taking a video inventory at the rental house, in case it burns to the ground.<\/p>\n
My voice is clinical and flat as I pan the camera around each room, peering into cupboards, narrating. Here in the kitchen, we have an electronic food scale and a manual scale,<\/em> we have pots and pans brought from the house to the rental, also we have serving dishes, glass canisters, an espresso machine …<\/i><\/p>\n Video is the quickest way to do an inventory, for insurance purposes, but there is a trauma to this performance.<\/p>\n It feels similar to reading old diaries. Stirs up a million details of life in a way that can be nauseating.<\/p>\n I imagine that the brain, having carefully sorted and stored\u00a0this information, has no mechanism to cope with the sudden onslaught of details from old memories.<\/p>\n Objects are even worse than journal-bound memories. Each object is vested with a million memories – wanting it, shopping for it, buying it, using it, misusing it, storing it, wanting to use it, neglecting it. So many objects – paints and brushes and canvases, electronic photo frames, pressure cooker, dressy clothes – are fraught with reminders about what I have not accomplished, what I meant to do but failed to do.<\/p>\n I trudge on, room by room, cataloging all these items so that I could at least recover their full replacement cost if our mountain community catches fire.<\/p>\n While\u00a0I am recording the jumble of electronics, cords and devices that crowd\u00a0our office space, a single word comes into my mind: Impoverished<\/em>.<\/p>\n That might seem a strange word to cover an abundance of possessions. But this is what my unconscious perceived in an instant: Having so many things and so much of it unused can symbolize\u00a0a poverty of spirit.<\/p>\n I\u00a0invest so much time, energy, and money in buying, maintaining, storing, moving, and eventually disposing of all these objects. What could I have accomplished if I’d lived my life as a monk, with only a few possessions?<\/p>\n A vow of poverty might have enriched me.<\/p>\n I finish the videos and shove the camera in my backpack. Now I have a record. In case I never see these things again.<\/p>\n Today’s penny is a 2012, the last time I did a video inventory.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am taking a video inventory at the rental house, in case it burns to the ground. My voice is clinical and flat as I pan the camera around each room, peering into cupboards, narrating. Here in the kitchen, we have an electronic food scale and a manual scale, we have pots and pans brought … read more Poverty amid plenty<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[52,35,1304,164,1333,1170,1289,75,270],"class_list":["post-9798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-52","tag-art","tag-fire","tag-house","tag-inventory","tag-possessions","tag-poverty","tag-spirit","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9798"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9801,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9798\/revisions\/9801"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}