collections

I get the need part-the feeling that you must have something to fill a need. This need comes in many forms, the need to look "right" the need to have supplies to make stuff or books to instruct or amuse, music to fill the air, space to arrange it so that you can find it, money to keep it coming. But isn't this need really just one big need that never gets filled?
Isn't it in the nature of the need itself to be unfulfilled or it ceases to exist and what part of ourselves has a preinstalled self destruction option?
So the need just keeps shifting from one aspect to another: shape shifting- to insinuate itself into whatever part is left unguarded, unprotected.
In some more refined context, it is called collecting, and this may be valid for some, safe and even profitable if a market exists. But I think for most, it is just unspecific need, drifting into our lives, fitting into whatever shape our wounds have assumed. Perhaps until we do whatever healing we need to do, before it goes away, or it does us irreparable harm.
I collect books on knitting and quilting and decorating and building: more than I will ever use...more than I can even find....in my piles. My personal stacks. I have bought bookshelves to house them and even joke about our library, but they are overflowing, unruly, and threaten to overtake what little open space we have unless the need is tamed or more likely replaced with a different, less demanding need.
Ah, but my needs are very demanding, the need for supplies and rooms to put them in, and the need for inspiration and time to implement and money to feed the supplies and keep the house and fund the inspiration. I have always been at odds with my needs, sometimes denying myself to an unhealthy degree and at other times self indulgent to the other unhealthy extreme of addiction, and mostly I have wavered somewhere in the middle, balancing on a high wire. With no net, the hushed crowd of my needs, gathered below in the dark tent.
This rave is precipitated by my not being able to find a book. One book. A book which has the pattern I need to begin the other mitten. It is here somewhere. I just know it.