What reminded me of the value of fire in the process of decluttering was reading a friend’s blog post about helping her friend clear out her office, The Art of Decluttering. She says “…We decided to create a ritual for letting some of these precious things go… Rather than tossing them in the trash, we made a pile to burn, an offering of prayers, to be transformed and carried away in the flames and smoke…”.
Recently I sat in front of my franklin stove and burned the sympathy cards I received after my father died. What a healing place to do this, the very fireplace my own father installed as a gift to himself and his family. The fireplace around which we have gathered many times to laugh and cry. I cried again, reading the tributes sent in his honour.
Read part two here as Lea again uses fire to transform objects and leave space for more life and energy.
Far from being a chore, decluttering is a means to ground yourself, honouring your past, respecting the stuff which you once valued and thought was important to have around you. Fire has a permanence unlike a shredding machine.
(This thread all started when I was googling some info on a play about decluttering when I found Lea’s Goode-Harris’ blog, Tales From the Labyrinth. It popped up out of the blue of course. She is the designer the labyrinth I painted for the turn of the Millennium. I had lost track of her. Gotta love those Google synchros!)
Evelyn Ward de Roo 
This is just lovely, and and need to bookmark and/or remember this as I am being smothered by the clutter in my homelife. Perhaps revisioning this will help.