{"id":2019,"date":"2022-08-25T23:26:41","date_gmt":"2022-08-25T23:26:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artfoodsoul.com\/?p=2019"},"modified":"2022-08-25T23:26:41","modified_gmt":"2022-08-25T23:26:41","slug":"stewardship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artfoodsoul.com\/?p=2019","title":{"rendered":"Stewardship"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Returned home from a few days away yesterday. My dad will be back late from Ireland tomorrow, and today I sweated bullets in his flat, sorting through stuff that\u2019s been lingering in boxes throughout his condo, gathering dust for the six years since my mother died. He has drawers, shelves, his attic \u2014 any possible nook imaginable with stuff cram-jammed everywhere. Stuff he\u2019s been holding onto for my sisters, me, grandkids, in the event one of us wants it, or \u201cneeds\u201d it. No one\u2019s shown up to claim it, he simply doesn\u2019t have the space to store it, and looking at these dusty boxes and unused home wares all the time\u2026becomes a constant drain whether we\u2019re aware of it or not. Old habits die hard though, he was a supply officer in the Marines, so he\u2019s like the lady with the pocketbook on the old show \u201cThe Price is Right,\u201d when the emcee asks for the most obscure thing and some lady in the audience waves that she\u2019s got it. That\u2019s my dad. Before you buy something, ask Dad. He might have it.
\nIt\u2019s hard going through this kind of stuff alone, representing several different lifetimes of a family\u2019s experiences \u2014 history, travels, and varied interests \u2014 all accoutrements meant to enhance daily living and hopefully spark joy, but joyful use is not happening when it\u2019s in boxes. My parents had lots of cool stuff \u2014 vintage and eclectic, collected from years of moving, travel, and my mother\u2019s interior decorating passions. I\u2019m basically curating, anything I keep must be used and cared for \u2014 I\u2019m thinking stewardship, not ownership. \u201cCurate!\u201d Such an overused word of late, it sounds rathe \u201ctwee\u201d and smug to me sometimes, unless we\u2019re talking art and history, libraries and museums. But I love the word stewardship a lot, much more so than ownership, in relation to the things we own, the land we live on, the spaces we reside in. On so many levels, cultivating stewardship, just makes more sense to me, and is making it easier for me to part with things, as I wonder who their next steward will be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Returned home from a few days away yesterday. My dad will be back late from Ireland tomorrow, and today I sweated bullets in his flat, sorting through stuff that\u2019s been lingering in boxes throughout his condo, gathering dust for the six years since my mother died. He has drawers, shelves, his attic \u2014 any possible … Continue reading “Stewardship”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[631],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artfoodsoul.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artfoodsoul.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artfoodsoul.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artfoodsoul.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artfoodsoul.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artfoodsoul.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2021,"href":"https:\/\/www.artfoodsoul.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2019\/revisions\/2021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artfoodsoul.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artfoodsoul.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artfoodsoul.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}