The Less-ness of Things

The Less-ness of Things

By Beth Kephart

The blue-dotted skirt has two saffron-colored stains, and I can’t remember where they came from. It hangs from its pinched clips among the popped buttons and fray of my modest walk-in closet, among nothing remotely a la mode or swanky. 

I keep my drawers insouciant, too—plenty of air above the black T-shirts, the white T-shirts, the occasional gray ones—and the storage bench where I plop my shoes is now sporting empty cubbies. The high heels are gone, the ill-fitting wedges, the sandals that sparkled as if there could be a party. My flats are quietly proud of themselves for being built of reconstituted plastic water bottles. I don’t lose them, because I can’t lose them. I wear them plenty.

I like our small house best when the windows are wide open and the breeze that blows in has ample room for whisking and whirling. My refrigerator and pantry are notoriously empty, though the door shelf of condiments could use some culling. I walk the mile each day to the store for fresh things. On Sundays I buy from the farmer’s market. Ingredients for but a few meals at a time, is my operandi now. And far less wilted parsley.

I still buy books, but not as many as I used to. Among my many shelves I now go shopping. I re-read Michael Ondaatje. I re-read Marilynne Robinson. I re-read Per Petterson. I re-read Alyson Hagy. It’s more interesting to me now, to read the books I’ve read before. They are a bridge toward my past. They teach me who I am inside this present. 

It’s like this now, but in truth it wasn’t always. Desire was a haunt. Desire chased me. Desire was my heart, beating too fast, or my words, hurrying and tripping, or my stomach aching from the second scoop of the ice cream I shouldn’t have been slurping in the first place.

What was it that I thought I needed? What activated my craving? Buying beautiful things—that dress, those shoes, that profusion of glass apples—because I lusted after beauty. Buying two of the one same thing in anticipation of some later losing. Filling the refrigerator with wilt-able lettuce and mold-able cheese so that no one would go hungry. Buying the same pair of heels in two separate hues, because what if—off chance—I would need a pair of white shoes someday?

I needed more, and more impelled me.

But desire is a shape shifter, and I have grown older. I have watched my mother and then my father die. I have (we all have) borne witness to a planet writhing. I have needed space, and I have claimed it. I have needed silence and isn’t silence less-ness? Less clutter. Less clatter. Less to toss away, to dump upon an earth that’s hardly breathing.

The things I want now are the things I can hold in my hands, the things that keep my hands active, curious, hoping. Paint and paper. Needle and thread. Scissors and glue. Soil and a shovel. The stuff of an amateur artist. 

At first my greed for these things was insatiable, a terrifying wanting. More fibers! More acrylics! More curved needles! More waxed linen thread! More flowers! But in time—it took a year or two—I tamed my need by leaning in toward the complex and all-consuming. 

Whereas I once made handmade cards and chain-stitched booklets, a dozen a day, and mailed them to my father’s friends, and then my own, I now make hardbound blank books with cyanotype covers and marbled endpapers and coptic stitched signatures—books crafted with care, over the course of many days. I listen to the birds through the open windows as I work. I luxuriate in the wide riff of the breeze. Whereas I once made monoprints and set them out to dry, declared them finished, I now build collages from my many prints, one small fraction by one small fraction, leaving the work for hours so that the glue might dry. Whereas I once bought potted flowers and dug them into the garden beds, I now take greatest pleasure from starting right at the start, which is to say by sprinkling seeds.

I have slowed myself down, and in slowing myself down, I have needed less and lived with an ease that had, in my need-soaked days, been inaccessible to me. The less-ness of things has yielded a more-ness of me—more magnitudes of hope, more range of gratitude, more willingness to look around and see.

—

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than three-dozen books in multiple genres. My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera has just been released by Temple University Press. More at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com

 

MY LIFE IN PAPER: ADVENTURES IN EPHEMERA

Paper both shapes and defines us. Baby books, diaries, sewing patterns, diplomas, resumes, letters, death certificates―we find our stories in them. My Life in Paper is Beth Kephart’s memoiristic exploration of the paper legacies we forge and leave.

Kephart’s obsession with paper began in the wake of her father’s death, when she began to handcraft books and make and marble paper in his memory. But it was when she read My Life with Paper, an autobiography by the late renowned paper hunter and historian Dard Hunter, that she felt she had found a kindred spirit, someone to whom she might address a series of one-sided letters about life and how we live it. Remembering and crafting, wanting and loving, doubting and forgetting―the spine and weave of My Life in Paper came into view.

Paper, for Kephart, provides proof of our yearning, proof of our failure, proof of the people who loved us and the people we have lost. It offers, too, a counterweight to the fickle state of memory.

My Life in Paper, illustrated by the author herself, is an intimate and poignant meditation on life’s most pressing questions.

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Category: On Writing