Heart of the Home

All these questions I have about going walkabout, being married and being a mother in a family and I chose to spend yesterday cleaning out my kitchen.  I'm not talking wiping down a few counters and cabinet door.  I am talking taking everything out of its drawer, cabinet, shelf and transplanting my kitchen into the dining room.  I'm talking deep cleaning every nook and cranny and getting rid of every crumb, greasy dust particle and fingerprint.  I'm talking about creating my kitchen from nothing and starting over, asking myself, "Where do these dishes really want to go?  What is the best place for these knives?  Do I love these dishes? Do I love these pans?"  And if I don't love them or use them, I am releasing them and letting them go. 

It took all day to clear the kitchen and clean it, even with help.  My dear friend, Anna, came over to clean the house for me, and never got out of the kitchen!  We cleared and cleaned so thoroughly that you could feel the brilliance shining right back at you.  It feels great!  Last night I started the process of putting things away, reluctantly.  I loved how empty my counters and cabinets were.  It all felt so fresh and full of possibility.  But, then I would walk into the chaos of my dining room and realized I had to start as bringing dishes and things back into the kitchen.  It was challenging to even do dinner, which was very simple and involved virtually no prep - because it took a while to find the knives, the cutting board, the silver ware!

How to start re-creating your kitchen and not just put what you took out back into the same place?

How to allow yourself, actually challenge yourself, to come from nothing and use the empty, clean kitchen as a blank canvas? 

I choose to CREATE FROM BEAUTY. 

What do I mean by that?  Years ago I "apprenticed" with a woman, Donna Bell, who would go into people's homes and help them to clear out the crap and get organized.  She went beyond organization though.  She integrated this concept of CREATING FROM BEAUTY as the essence of her work.  When one creates from Beauty - internally and externally - one creates the possibility of magic, being in the present, miracle.  One creates possibility to live the life one really wants, and to manifest what one really wants.  If the external is a reflection of the internal, and vice versa, then how one creates one's space is a direct reflection of what is going on for someone internally.  I don't know how well I am describing this, but I don't want to get too caught up in the words. 

Think of this way.  When you have only that which you love and experience as beautiful, uplifting, resonant, enlivening, in your spaces - whether it is your sock drawer, your kitchen cabinet, your book shelf, your bedroom, your kitchen, your house and your garage - your external world reflects back to you the beautiful, resonant, uplifting and enlivening part of yourself - your true self.  Then, the internal and the external work together in harmony, joy, and ease, or in Maria Nemeth's words, in "clarity, focus, ease and grace."    There are no justifications, shoulds, should nots, have to's, to get in the way and block the authentic expression of who you are.

You get to experience very directly who you are, what you really want, and what lights you up?

As you re-create a space, you get to ask yourself, "Do I love this? Do I use this? When was the last time I used this?  Why do I have it?  Did my mother give it to me?  Do I love this?"  If there is a justification of any kind, pay attention to this. 

The justification could be my mother gave it to me, and I can't not keep it; or it may be that  I got a really good deal on that set of dishes; or I love the color yellow, and that dress is yellow so of course I love it.  Never mind that I don't wear it because it doesn't ft quite right.  Some day I may wear it. 

Can you hear yourself in any of that?

Oh my gosh...if you could have seen my house 10 years ago.  It was filled with justifications, shoulds, and have to's.  My home did not reflect who I was, or my family was, in a way that I was comfortable or at ease with at all.  I still have the "before" pictures and I will look at them once in a while and remember the pain of that time of my life.  Three young children, financially struggling, living in a house that didn't flow or work with our family at all, but we loved the location.  With Donna's help and creating from Beauty, I re-created my drawers and cabinets, every room in the house, and my life, our lives. 

Amazing.  Our more authentic and natural expression got to come out and reveal itself in the spaces in our home, and as a result, got to be expressed in our work, our lives, our passions.  Our lives became more aligned with who we are and what we really want.

Every time I am desiring to move and expand my life to its next level of creation, manifestation and expression, I clear, clean and create from Beauty. 

This time I started with the kitchen, the heart of the home and the hearth.  I thought I was going to start upstairs with my bedroom and bathroom, but given that this process got delayed by 2 days, I found myself yesterday morning in the kitchen knowing that this was the starting place. 

The heart of the home.  The hearth.  The center of any home's activity.  It's where we generate ourselves and our meals from.  In our home, it is where we leave the home from to go out in the world.  It is where we return into our home.  It is often the only part of the home  that people see if they are dropping off a child for a play date.  Our kitchen is both the heart of the home and the eye - the window to our family's inner life that is contained within our home.

We live in a 100-year old farmhouse that has been remodeled at some point before we moved in.  Our kitchen has always been challenging, and while cleaning yesterday, I experienced very directly how poorly designed it really is.  Whoever placed the cabinets and designed the counters did not spend a lot of time in the kitchen cooking.  So I have to make the best of  a situation that is far from optimal.  We will not be re-doing our kitchen any time soon.  Too many other priorities ahead of a new kitchen.

Of course the kitchen is where everyone gathers, no matter how many of  us there are.  It just may be one or two people, or sometimes up to 20 if we are having a gathering. You know how kitchens are.  It's the room everyone wants to be in.  It truly is the heart of the home, no matter how big or small it is, how perfectly designed - or not- that it is. 

So no wonder I got to start the process of clearing in the kitchen!  I am still in the middle of it.  I just looked up from my computer to look into the dining room and could see the boxes of food, glasses, bowls, and stuff that still needs to be handled so that the kitchen can be complete.

What are my most beautiful objects in the kitchen?  What is the Beauty from which I create my kitchen?  The copper molds that I have hung on the kitchen walls.  I love copper, and I love these molds.  My mother has a beautiful collection of antique bowls and containers, and she knows that is what I want when she is ready to let them go.  It may not be for a long while, and that's okay.  I have 3 fish molds above my stove hood, a rooster above the coat rack, and a beautiful mandala type of mold to the left of the stove. 

I would love to have a copper cauldron in the middle of my kitchen.  Wouldn't that be beautiful?  But I don't have a copper cauldron and there is no room in the middle of the kitchen!  Yet as I imagine the copper cauldron in the center of my hearth, I feel centered, calm, and pulled to the heart of my home.  Drawn to the heart of the heart, to the center of the center. 

As I write, I keep asking myself, "what is the connection between clearing out my kitchen and healing the split in  my belly?"  I can feel that there is a connection because as many times as I have engaged in this process of clearing and creating, I have never started in my kitchen before.  I have always started in the bedrooms and moved toward and into the kitchen.  This time I have been strongly impulsed to start in the kitchen and move outward.  Hmmm...

The heart is the center.  The kitchen is the center.  My heart is my center.  My belly is my center.  To create from the highest, most true place of myself, I must start with the heart.  I must start with the core of the center.  To start in the bedrooms would be like starting with my arms and legs.  I must start and create from my heart, for this is the true center of the Beauty.  How can I know what I experience as Beauty unless I come from my heart? 

I then find myself asking about my heart - the heart in my chest and the heart of my belly?  Are they the same?  How are they connected?  How are my heart and my womb connected?  How do they work together? 

This weekend I commit to using the "Healing the Heart of the Womb" meditation and experiencing what is there for me around these questions.  Perhaps, cleaning and creating my kitchen is all of a part of this process.

Suseya!
Sahara