Stripped bare

It's autumn and the leaves are falling/have fallen. Once again we can see the river from our hilltop perch.

When you write about your characters, we want to know all about their leaves and colors and growth. But we also want to know who they are when stripped of the surface show.
--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, New York: Anchor, 1995, pp. 82-83.

Stripped of image, frills, leaves, labels, security, resources....what's left of me under the surface?
I don't always like what I see, and that is a good challenge.

There are lots of things I need less of: food, anger, talking, clutter, stuff, ...
and some things I need more of: water, exercise, prayer, listening, writing.

Manfred MaxNeef makes an interesting distinction between needs and satisfiers--or false satisfiers. It raises questions: what do I really need? What do I accumulate for the wrong reasons? I would like to live more simply in many different ways.

You can see the underlying essence only when you strip away the busyness, and then some surprising connections appear. Anne Lamott, p. 84

Sometimes I lose sight of the connectedness of all things. It is good to strip away the things that make it hard to see/experience/live a connected life--in which we are all one in the one Body of God.