We have painted the apartment and have gotten enough furniture in to have it really feel like home now. I seem to have fallen off the blogging wagon lately- it seems I have been once again running through my life with my arms flung out in front of me ready to embrace whatever is showing up next. And though I am busy and full and my learning curve is way steep, I am not stressed. Our sweet little apartment is really amazingly good feeling. And my cancer moon self wants nothing more than to stay put. Or go out and buy things for it and then stay put. I love the fact that I can walk a minute to work and that i work only half days so that even though starting in February I'll work 6 days a week, three weeks of the month (the other week i have three days off in a row), I'll have the afternoons or mornings to putter, knit, spin, cook, container garden, etc.
All of the small things become so important, each detail powerful- cleaning crumbs left on the bread board, using the oven for the first time, sitting and knitting and looking out at the chestnut tree and the sky changing behind it as the sun sets, cooking supper for nic, learning solitude again, finding my own rhythms of the most ordinary things- like doing dishes or washing the bathroom sink (the first never at night after cooking dinner, the second always at night before bed). I find myself nourished by these simple things: the opportunity to care for my surroundings and give them my time and energy and have them shining with beauty in return. Ordinary every day beauty, like a cupboard with cups and bowls and plates in it. (The close up picture of the cupboard would not upload correctly, so you get to see a bit more of the apartment and a me in it.)
I learn that handmade is a choice of not wasting and of what we bring into the house- for example not having things we don't use at least once a week- so that each thing itself is brought into our hands often enough that we have a relationship with it. That nothing sits in our house unused, unexplored, unrelated to. That everything has a place and a function is a way of settling the heart and mind. There is a living metaphor between our physical house and our soul. John O'Donahue says in his book, Anam Cara, that the body exists in the soul, rather than the other way around. Relationship is created through touching a thing, using it well, caring for it, and returning it to its place, its home, if you will. Perhaps everything we have or use is not yet or not only handmade, but we can make it our own through our interaction with it.
We have no refrigerator yet, and i find that i am learning to have in the house only what we can eat within a day or two or at most a week, say in the case of cheese or onions. We do have the foyer space just inside the front door to the house which is unheated that allows us to keep a few things, say milk and vegetables for a few days at most. Working at a small organic food store allows me to bring home what I need on any given day so that things are fresh, especially as vegetables are delivered every day to the store. It makes such a difference to not be able to put something in the refrigerator and forget about it, or have 5 different kinds of jam open, because it will spoil or mould. There is a certain circle of responsibility that comes from not having a way of keeping food over time. I have to know what I want to cook and plan for it in order to have the food, but that just means I get to look in my beautiful cookbooks, or dream up something earlier that day. And I learn what things I need in my pantry to keep stocked- potatoes, onions, cans of tomatoes, dry beans, pasta, grains, etc. but not so many things, not so much that I don't even know what is there.
I think knowing the contents of my home- its corners and drawers and cupboards is also a way of settling in, settling the mind and heart and of making a place a home, rather than a place I park my stuff. To know each and every thing and being in a relationship of care with, for, and of it. To create a place where things can be made by hand, can be dreamed up through the space that is kept available and empty.
I come from a long line of hoarders. Flat surfaces are meant to hold stacks of things, or piles, tables are meant to not only have things on top of them that must be moved in order to use the table, but also on the chairs and under the tables. Closets, cupboards, and drawers are for holding, for the most part, the stuff we have but don't know what to do with. The stuff that is used lies around on the surfaces because there is no room left in the areas of storage. Always having things- for the future, because i plan to do something with it later, because i might need it, because having to buy one later will cost money and i can have it now for free, because it is beautiful, because it has a story connected to it, because I don't know what else to do with it- so many reasons for keeping things I don't need around.
And none of it can come with us when we leave this body. That is the perspective I would like to keep. Not to be morbid, but to be honest. To actually have a living relationship with the things I have now and not wait for later. And to let things go when their usefulness has run its course, gracefully, as I hope I will this body some day. Until then, with much gratitude, I make a home and a life here on the corner of hen street and pea street, a place from which I can run, full of wonder, into the world with my arms stretched wide open in front of me.
"If you live the life you love, you will receive shelter and blessings" John O'Donahue
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