Be the change you want to see.

I woke up this morning to sweet cuddles and caresses from a warm sleepy husband. Nothing more than cuddles this time, as he read his newspaper with one hand and ran the other absent mindedly over my head. I felt like a cat in a lap, warm and contented and loved. When he rose to wash up, I worked on my morning stretches. It feels so good to move the body, the First Home, to have it respond so sweetly to my requests. Bodies are wonderful, they soak up the sunlight and warmth, they feel the touch of loved ones, they can work, kiss, write, interpret for the brain. Bodies are the filters through which we experience pleasure, all the pleasures. Sex and food and running and tickling, laughter and back scratches and massage, intoxication of love or of good wine. I am in good health, able to accomplish what I set out to do of a day without more than slight pains or discomfort. Doing pretty well for a middle-aged woman whose favorite activities are writing, gardening, and cooking.
I am thankful for my body.

When I finished my stretches and my morning meditation, my husband had begun preparing breakfast. I always boil a pot of black tea for myself, as he doesn’t care for it. We had crepes with ham and cheese and apple, and a dash of maple syrup. Then he got on the computer to book hotel reservations and make other arrangements for our upcoming trip, and then we worked together on preparing the Thanksgiving duck. Last night he was working for hours, between research on a project for our house, fine tuning a home improvement project (this required a skill saw that lets him cut a tidy hole in the wall for a new electrical outlet). Before that, he had been supervising the final stages of some work being done in our yard.
I am thankful for my husband.

My life is very abundant. The loving husband and friends and chosen family and biological family are all blessings to me. Though I have never carried to term, I am a beloved auntie and sister-mom to many children, I have worked in schools with many children, I have loved many children. I am surrounded by friends who seek my company. I am surrounded by people who speak and write to me with supportive and kind words, who encourage my artistic endeavors, who inspire me with how they work and play and strive to build a better world.
I am thankful for my community, and the connections within it.

My home is colorful and comfortable. We have quilts on the beds, clothes in the closets, warm curtains against the chill. We have an outdoor space that is green and lovely, with water and earth and space to grow food. We have a kitchen and a living room with space to entertain comfortably, and food enough in the pantry and refrigerator to feed people we like and love. Our soft and lazy felines nap in the sunshine, on our laps, atop stereo speakers and under the kitchen table. They love us, rub against us, talk to us, chide us when the food is late or the box unscooped, and their antics continue to make us laugh down the years.
I am thankful for our lovely house, and for our sweet cats.

Recently I have been writing very prolifically. The ideas and images have been flowing easily to my pen and my screen, and releasing them and arranging them has been giving me great joy. For many years now, I seek the printed word for comfort, whether reading them or writing them. I feel like I am hitting “the zone”, as runners do, as other artists do. The words are friendly and flirty and I handle them comfortably, even when they zip and zing and burn, even when they are as cold and mean as dry ice.
I am so very thankful for the words and for my muse, and for the privilege of crafting with words.

I'm writing today because this subject is Relevant To My Interests at the moment. My house is cluttered and I need to put stuff away, throw stuff away, fold stuff up... Yeah. STUFF.

I'm sure most of us have heard the acronym KISS: it usually stands for Keep It Simple, Sweetie (if we are being kind to ourselves, which is something I DO strive to do)...

This is a good starting point for clutter clearing and house clearing. Keeping It Simple will look different to each one of us. It might mean making our bed every morning so we have one flat clear surface in our house to sit on. It might mean remember to recycle your food scraps out to the compost bin, because you want to keep food out of the landfills when it makes perfectly good dirt, if left alone long enough. =) It might mean OMG I HAVE TO CLEAR OFF MY DESK BECAUSE I CAN'T FIND THE BILLS!

Keep It Simple, to me, means build between one and three good habits at one time, no more than that. And don't kill yourself with guilt if you make a mistake, forget, or otherwise fuck up. Seriously. More good habits go down the toilet because we (the collective We of Puritannically-Inspired America or Western Civilization generally) kick ourselves so violently, and even quit trying when we make a mistake or fail to keep up with a particular habit, or else we spend time in self-castigation or self-loathing at our "inability" to Do Whatever It Is, Perfectly...

Especially if the Habit is a Should. (and THAT is another post, it deserves a detailed examination)

How do we teach children new skills? we encourage them to make mistakes and try again (unless we've got our ego involved in our kids being PERFECT, which I feel "should" be another dirty word, tbh...) How did I practice cross-country-skiing this weekend? I tried, failed, fell down, had to get help getting back up because I couldn't figure it out for myself.

We need to be forgiving of ourselves when we try something new. Be kind, and allow for errors, inconsistencies, and mistakes.

In service of that, let me offer another meaning for the acronym KISS, one that I find very useful in building my clutter-clearing habits:
Keep it Small and Significant.

To explain: OK y'all, I'm Pagan. *waves hello* I find it easier to do household tasks if I assign value or meaning to them beyond the "this has to get done" rationale. What I choose to do is to think of those tasks as service to something larger than myself. I sometimes dedicate tasks to the marriage (i.e. washing the dirty sheets or clearing off the bedroom bureau, which is what I did yesterday) or to my Patron Deity, Hestia (i.e. that's almost the only way you'll get me to wash the floors without someone else helping in the task.)

Keep it Small and Significant. Yesterday I cleared unnecessary things off the bureau, and selected a fresh tablecloth in springtime colors (Hey, I can anticipate!). Today I plan to take *everything* off the bureau, wipe down the surfaces and clean the dust off the candle and candle-plate, and re-make the bedroom "altar". Though, it's not really an altar, it's more like a meditation space.

returning to comment on clutter clearing: Over the weekend I went to visit family, and picked up a big mirror that used to be my grandmother's, and also a bag of smaller items that used to be hers. I know that my spouse doesn't really approve of me bringing more STUFF into the house, but I did it anyway. I have emotional clutter around her, my mom's mom, Inez. I feel the need to spend some time meditating on her and her life, and what she meant to me and to my mom, and by incorporating some of her former possessions into the new iteration of the meditation space, I hope to facilitate that work. This is SIGNIFICANT To Me. Which means that even taking more Things into my house? I'm okay with that, since the Things have a definite purpose.

So. Small and Significant. When my bedroom surfaces (and floor) are clear, I think better. Hell, when ALL my surfaces are clear I think MUCH better. But today I'm only going to hold myself accountable for the bedroom. Anything else I get done is gravy. (though I am fairly strongly motivated to clear off at least the kitchen table) (and that's what SMALL looks like to me.)

Small to me, means doable in a single session, usually between 15 minutes and an hour.
Significant can mean any of a number of things:
It will make Jeff happy. It will make me happy. I will enjoy looking at it. I will use the space if it is a) cleared, b) cleaned, c) empty, etc. We have friends coming over, and I want to be proud of my living space. We're coming up on a festival celebration and I want the whole house clean in honor of the festival.

You get the picture! Just remember: both Small and Significant will look different in how they want to manifest in YOUR life (as opposed to in MY life).

So this is my advice to you: Keep it Simple, Sweetie, and Keep it Small And Significant.

Next Post will be about Not Shoulding All Over Yourself.

ciao!

So, um, "laundry" mushroomed out into "fold AND reorganize All The Things" which then assimilated "Purge the closets and drawers and linen cabinet and put winter clothes into storage".

What this ACTUALLY means is that four hours later I have a heap of clothes to give away but there are still unfolded clothes on the bed.

Isn't there a search term for meandering around all over and getting there indirectly? There's a quilt pattern called "Drunkard's Walk" that reminds me of how my early afternoon has progressed.

Well. I'll go give it another fifteen minutes and power through to get the bed cleared off. That clean laundry has been piled up, in some places, for a week.