The cleaning took days, and required quite a few nap breaks. It's not just that I've been focusing all of my energies outside my home lately. It is also the fact that I've never really unpacked my things. I moved in here a year ago. This is the home where both The Attitude of Gratitude Project and the Prosperity Project were born. This is the home whose energy was perfect for me to finally begin writing the words that have been swimming around in my brain for decades. Until this weekend, though, I've never quite allowed myself to feel at home here. Parts of my spirit have been scattered in homes that exist in other places and in other times. This weekend I have decided to call back those pieces of myself so that this space in the here and now can finally become my true home.
I wasn't quite ready to give up my condo when I left it last year. I had lived and worked there for ten years, and the boyfriend had built a beautiful custom kitchen for me that I hated leaving behind. I left quite a bit of my spirit there when I left. There are other homes where pieces of my spirit also chose to stay: the cabin in Maine on a lake in Gray, the North Carolina cabin where I stayed with friends this past fall, the home in Maine where I was a small child, the tiny apartment on the river I lived in once in Cocoa Beach, where I first realized that it was my dharma to write.
My spirit has also resided in imaginary places that do not exist in the real world. In the Prosperity Project, I imagined that I used the money to build an addition onto this house that would be my creative studio. It had a writing desk, a piano, a library, and a nap station. At times I imagined this room to be in a separate building, or on a separate property, or even a rented studio in town. Although I thought I was focused on wanting that space, what I was really focused on was the lack of having that space. I felt a longing, and often a bitterness that I no longer had my own room and space in which to play with words and music. The longing and sense of lack were so great at times that I considered moving out and getting my own place, even if it would mean the end of my current relationship.
This weekend, I allowed myself four whole days of simply being. And cleaning. I freed myself from the need to read and write, and I have been deliberately not busy. For the first two days I didn't even turn on the TV or music. I simply moved about the house, calmly and silently putting things away. In the process, I discovered a room where none had before existed. I often dream of this very thing: I am walking through a house I know well, and a room appears that had not been there before. It's always a delightful discovery!
It was a room without walls, which is why I've never seen it before. I moved a small desk near the piano, and against the side of the refrigerator I stacked milk crates which I filled with books. I went to Walmart to buy a rug that would fit underneath the desk and chair, to protect the beautiful bamboo floor. It was the rug that did it. I stood back and realized that I had built the very studio that I had imagined months before in the Prosperity Project. I has a writing desk next to the piano, so that I can work on words and music at the same time, as the mood strikes. It has a library. You can see it there on the left edge of the photograph, milk crates stacked two wide and five high. There are two napstations, another very important element in a creative studio, and immediate access to a kitchen.
When I stood in the middle of the room I had created out of thin air, I realized suddenly that I am at home. I have always been at home here, I was just too busy seeing it with ungrateful eyes to recognize it for the sacred space that it really is.
Today I begin writing in this space. But before I begin, I call back to myself all of the pieces of myself I have left scattered elsewhere. We will live here now. We will be contented and well-nourished here. The other day my reiki sister advised that I learn to be where my feet are. That is excellent advice. It is no accident that I live here in this house and that my job is to run a pool store. These places are where my dharma has led me, and it is here that I am at home. These may not be my final destination, but they are where my life has led me today, and so I will be here. All of me, here where my feet are.
Let us then begin.
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TECHNORATI CLAIM NO:
I'm so glad you're home, sister & grateful that home for you is close to me.
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