Garbage & Ghosts

Webster defines “catharsis” as emotional or psychological cleansing, and that is exactly what I felt last Saturday when I joined the International Coastal Clean-up. This year’s clean-up was not as taxing as last year’s. The beach was not as vast, nor as polluted.

Garbage is garbage, period. But one thing I did notice about those found in Naic is that the garbage there was buried under the sands. The only indications that you can see of extensive environmental damage from the outside is the telltale flutter of a small corner of a plastic bag in the salty wind. They are as icebergs on an unforgiving ocean – 10% can be seen, and 90% of its uncompromising bulk is hidden and lurking beneath the surface. So in order to accomplish the objective you’ve set for yourself, you must dig, and dig hard.

Have you ever pondered on the mysterious weight of wet sand? How does something as fluid and moveable as water become the most effective adhesive for grains of the lightest powdery sand? Pushing and digging through wet sand might be comparable to a struggle against concrete that’s beginning to settle. One is forced to focus all thought and all energy into the effort of uprooting a piece of plastic from its death-grip on the earth. What’s surprising is that when you have reached that point of peaked concentration, everything takes on a certain clarity that can rarely be reached in any other way. And you find yourself digging, struggling, and battling with demons so long and so deeply buried in your own forgetfulness…

So you breathe such a sigh, and you let go of your hoarded demons and ghosts, watch them pile up, segregated, separated, and differentiated from that which used to be so familiar to you. They were once the treasures you held close with your senses, but somehow had been changed by time and indifference. There they are now, piled up, waiting to be classified, tallied, and weighed. For how long were you the one to carry all that weight around? For how long has life been too heavy?

I’d never been one to easily give up on something. I carry my burdens as best as I can. I’ve taken on every yoke given me and tried my best not to complain. But there are memories and pains that have been carried for so long; I never noticed that I’ve become immune to the stench of their rot as they festered there in the darkest corners of my psyche. The garbage I buried and carried for all this time…

I highly recommend going through catharsis every once in a while. I feel that I’ve cleansed myself even as I helped clean a little piece of the earth. I have felt the sublime freedom of release from my past ghosts, my accumulated garbage. So should everyone else.

(posted elsewhere 7 Dec 2005)