Clearing the House

We had the most ferocious rainstorm earlier this week.  The heavens opened up suddenly and an insane amount of water poured down for about an hour like someone up there had opened a faucet.  A few days later, I needed to get something from the closet in the family room and discovered we have a leak in the roof. The contents of the closet, all our board games, clothes, assorted treasures had been soaked.  It forced me to being the process of house clearing that I have been postponing for so long.

In a break from hanging damp clothes outside to dry and picking through wet cardboard bits to try to save “Candyland”, one of my daughter’s childhood favorites, I picked up a book by Denise Linn called “Sacred Space”.  I had read it about ten years ago, but forgotten many of the ideas that this healer/ house shaman recommends for clearing and enhancing the energy of your home.  To put it simply, she believes that our houses are physical representations of what’s going on inside us.  “The regard in which you hold your home can rouse an ancient and replenishing spirit from the deep to fill your home," Linn says, ”This power can heal you in the very center of your soul and heart.”

When I woke up yesterday and began my usual morning routine, I felt an undeniable, almost magnetic pull back to my bedroom.  Like a woman possessed, I began to clean and purge my room, determined to make it a true sanctuary.  By seven o’clock last night, I had finally cleared and transformed the over-cluttered, dusty place into a room that I actually liked to be in again.  I know deep inside that my mission over the next week is to clear the surfaces of each room of our house so that I would have this same sense of pleasure if my gaze stopped to linger in any corner.  Time to let go of so many objects that no longer have meaning or purpose in our lives. Time to move on.

While my mother was struggling through her dementia over the last ten years, it took all my energy and focus to keep the rest of my family on track and to care for her. One of the first things that Denise Linn suggests is that everyone who lives in the house help create a written intention of what you would like the place to be.  It’s time for my husband and me to decide together how to make our home full of love, creativity and promise. There was definitely a different vibe at the charming cottages we lived in before my daughter was born and my mom moved in, and I’ve been trying to identify what it was.  More music playing, more friends dropping by unannounced, more spontaneous fun. We could use that energy around here now.

I’m looking forward to having the holidays here at home again without rushing up to the nursing home on Thanksgiving and Christmas, feeling torn and longing to be back home. It made me sad for the last five years that my mom was not able to be here with us, and I used to remind myself that soon there would be a day when we wouldn’t have to feel divided anymore.  And here we are. My daughter is already making plans to bring home her new friends to stay with us at Thanksgiving, so the house will be full of lively college kid buzz. 

It’s time to clear the house and begin the next chapter.