Making room for change

Dear Stinky Dink,

Yesterday you left at 5:30AM with your Daddy to Tennessee for a few days. I spent the whole day organizing and de-cluttering, specifically your bedroom. I finally got around to removing all of my things from your bedroom, including what amounted to six boxes of books and random things that were hiding in a storage cabinet. I labeled paper bags with "throw away," "give away," "recycle," and "belongs somewhere else" and filled them to the brim. There are many other parts of the house to work on, but your room feels good. Clean. Organized.

I get this way periodically. “This way” is that I want to rummage through closets, cupboards, cluttered spaces and let go of all the things I once needed or thought I should keep because someone gave them to me. Sometimes I feel guilty letting things go that others gave me, even if they don't feel right anymore, or maybe never did.

In Feng Shui, we're encouraged to let go of anything that doesn't bring us up, or make us feel good by looking at it. There are Feng Shui cures we can do to improve less than optimal spaces or locations of rooms (such as my last flat which had a toilet in the money corner and I literally flushed money away while I lived there!), but what comes first always is letting go of clutter.

Your Daddy and I tackle the garage periodically, rearranging and removing, and then it gets filled back up again with things he finds in houses he sells and things we no longer want in the living spaces of the house. Then we clean it out, then we fill it back up. I must say though, that things are never static in this house. Change lives here.

I like change though. Change is the nature of the universe. The turkey vulture that flies overhead represents change. Often they represent the death of an animal they can call lunch, but death is change as well. Change is the death of something, death of an old way of doing things for a new way.

For a while now I've been living in a place of fear, feeling trapped by circumstances and situations. This has begun to shift, I can feel the lightness, the hope, the transition from fear to trust. I have been working in a place that doesn't really suit me, but I have been afraid to make a change, afraid to take a leap without a place to land.

I also started reading a new book, recommended by a friend, called The Power of Now. What the author says isn't brand new, but he writes in a way that appeals to me now. He writes about how the mind is constant chatter, mostly living in the past or projecting scenes onto the future. Neither are me, my true self, he writes. One suggestion he makes is to observe the one in my head doing all the thinking but not think about the thinking. Just observe the words as they pass on through.

I've done this in meditation and in yoga, but it's funny, I've never tried to watch the thinking, I've only tried to stop the thinking. He is reminding me that I am not these thoughts. I am infinite, beyond the judgments and fears in my head.

Reading this, I've felt more peaceful in the last few days. Problems that could have been huge turned out to be small, easily resolved. When my mind gets anxious, noisy, and afraid, I smile, tell it to relax, or even just a humorous library Shush! works well.

Then, of course, but not of course, because I'm not in that place of fear, a friend called me out of the blue and has a possible new job for me. This job feels like what's next - the what's next I've been wondering about for a while. My friends would say things like this always happen to me, and I would say that they do, as long as I'm not paying too much attention.

If I could teach you anything, little one, I would teach you how to quiet the chatter in your head. I would teach you about that calm place that lives inside you, a place of total love and total trust. But right now, you're seventeen months old, and you pretty much live in that place already.

Hopefully by the time the chatter finds you, you will have the tools to tell it to Shush! as you have more important things to do than listen.

I love you, Ava Jasmine. Come home soon.
Mamama