Next stop: Kathmandu, Nepal

I've been working the past few days at stuffing our life into four suitcases - paring everything down to the absolutely-can't-live-without. I look around at all the things we've accumulated the past few years and am sort of wistful about the days when everything I owned fit into the large green hiking pack I used to lug around India...talk about the bare essentials.

It's amazing what you can live without when you must - and I'm laughing now at the downtown Seattle closet, not to mention the apartment, I once filled to the brim with all the junk I thought was absolutely necessary to make me happy, a closet bigger than the main room of our current house.

I'm still a crow - coveting all the shiny things that catch my eye, no matter where I am in the world. But knowing now that I'm going to have to cart whatever it is I think I want or need around from country to country works wonders on the will power.

Friends and family, knowing of my penchant for decorating even the most temporary of spaces, are asking me what I'm planning to do with the 25+ rooms in the Kathmandu house and I just shrug and reply 'Overlong, sheer, white curtains on every window and door, and that's it.' I've freed myself from the need to fill my space, my soul (whatever it is we're trying to fill with so much stuff) with things. I've got my husband, my Mooshy, and more than a few but not too many lovely things to wear. Enough is enough is enough and we are blessed with exactly whatever it is we're meant to have at any given moment; even if we can't manage to see it that way, especially with the media and society working so hard to convince us otherwise.

There will be no television - who needs it with the Himalayas off the balcony; there will be no artwork on the walls - who needs it with a rose garden the size of a football field; there will be a whole lot of nothing - and who needs much else anyway? A big empty house filled with billowing white curtains, fresh roses, music and joy and that sounds just fine to me.

Four days and counting. Here goes nothing, again, as always...