ENJOYING CHAOS
“Grandma, your house is too relaxing,” Adele commented to me. I knew she was right; I have not been able to figure out how to raise the energy in my house; I want to take a nap all the time. “You need to paint it all white with black trim!” was her solution. The black trim didn’t sound right, but I considered white walls. I do love the light green in the living room and the dark intense red in the dining room, but I realized that white walls would, in fact, lift the energy.
Once decided, I was at it immediately, grabbing the first available non-painter to do the painting. In one day my very petite but determined housecleaner, Ruthie from Indonesia, had done the entire living room (she’d never painted before) and then the next weekend she did the dining room. And it does the trick! The energy is WOW! – lifted and light.
However, the rest of the house is in chaos, as we had quickly moved everything in these rooms “elsewhere”, just anywhere; now the dining room is completely empty and happy and light, the rest of the house is a stumbling muddle.
I’m reluctant to just return all that was in these rooms back to the way it was. The new feeling of lightness is to savor. In the chaos, I’ve been finding what I need here and there, moving things a little to be more convenient, and feeling strangely happy and laid back. No compulsion drives me to get going with this re-ordering process. A matter of fact, something-in-me feels NEW and happy!
I feel an opportunity here to do what I always say and “get rid of things”. I wonder what I really will miss? I feel like putting things back just one piece by one piece, very slowly as they call to me.
This re-ordering is not just about “simplifying”, making things look and feel lighter and more open. This is really about cutting ties with my past! I am a sentimentalist, keeping souvenirs of every person and experience I’ve treasured, even those that were heartbreaking or mixed bags. I also collect against the future: books I hope to read “someday”, projects started and yet to finish ”someday”. Following the basic guideline of the young Japanese advisor (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo), I feel ready to be completely honest about how each item makes me feel. She says, “If it doesn’t bring you joy – Get rid of it!”
This sounds logical but really requires immense honesty and courage. With some items I feel an obligation to be “respectful”, maybe grateful; to this impulse I respond by respectfully either burning or burying such items, unless, of course, they can be given away.
I have found that giving myself permission to be truthful about my feelings towards people and events is immensely healing. Truth, truth, truth: the medicine for endless ailments of body and spirit. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free!” said Jesus. Learning to be thoughtful of others has been a valuable learning in my life, but protecting others from my honest experience of them has sometimes gone too far, for their well-being as well as my own. Truth heals everyone, in the end.
And anyway, even wonderful experiences at some point are “past.” One has the choice to just turn forward and face the adventure, let go of the pulls of the past, good or bad, and see what’s there yet! New learnings, new fun! Who knows what unexpected abilities are still inside me?
Last night in my dreaming, wonderful feelings of freedom were coming up. Here are a few of the images that came:
Some part of me has been a prisoner in a basement! / I’ve been an “indentured servant” to the happiness of others, to what others needed from me. Now I seem to have gathered enough experience to cut out on my own, to follow my own knowing of what is right for ME.
“No one owns me. My life belongs to me” came back to me. I know this was from a previous life, something I scribbled in the dirt in a dungeon as I refused to eat, having been kidnapped….
Riding a tiger, a dream image from the nearer past, now I feel the tiger is my assertive self who knows how to find its own true path, even in the dark through a jungle. “Walking under the stars in the dark, the tiger knows that it knows the path.”
I walk in wildness, off the thread that would connect the past and the future that it would lead to. I find a thread inside me and follow it to an unknown future….
Now I stand on top of the dune, free.
Alone? No, there are many who cheer the true me, adventurers in their own lives. We inspire each other.
“Alting du behover.” (Swedish: Everything you need [will come to you]) This had come to me as a message from spirit in my past and then I saw it again on a wall painting that I will keep. From somewhere comes the promise of Power with me, behind, below, around.
Different; The chaos in my house enables different. It protects me from limitations I no longer need.
and “How things look?” = Distraction!
I use my gathered resources and stand in this still-intact body. My riches, my support, are all my experience that I carry invisibly with me.
I, the giant, hiding in my little body, face forward into adventure, protected by chaos, …..
Marti Matthews September 15, 2020