The holiday starts early at my house, and it's full of reflection
By this time 2022, the stated plan was to have sold the house, organize a temporary place to live, start to study Spanish for a move to Colombia.
None of that happened.
What did happen was more interesting. Plans to move meant letting go of pretty much everything superfluous that I owned. That included all my collectibles from my travels, which were so numerous they filled a big house, and most of my furniture. I figured, rightly so, or so I thought, that intention expressed to the Universe to be released and be moved to the next perfect place for me would allow those things to move forward without any impediment.
Of course, the gods guffawed.
I now have almost nothing in the house, for those items grace other folks' homes or are wrapped in pretty paper for the coming gifting season. As well they might be.
Yesterday I stopped in to my consignment store, which has been so very helpful in this phase, to see what hadn't sold, and what needed to be picked up.
It was instructive.
A few things remained, things I still love (or I'd not have bought them to begin with), but they were marked WAY down. Truth, they aren't wanted. They are still mine, to do with what I wish, once the store owners give people one more last shot at low low LOW prices for precious objects.
At one level I wanted them gone. At another, a deep part of me, especially since some of what was returning to me were Chinese figurines of horses (my love of loves), I had to figure, they must really be mine. For now anyway.
There's a saying for which there is no real source but it's popular for good reason:
If you love something very much
Let it go free.
If it does not return, it was not meant to be yours.
If it does return, love it as hard as you can for the rest of your life.
No, it's not from Johnathan Livingston Seagull. Like so many good sayings, sometimes there's no source. That doesn't leach the truth of it, though.
I called my dear friend Dr. Rosenna Bakari a few days ago to wish her a good birthday as she has just turned sixty. We had a long, lively talk, as we always do. She made a comment which not only struck me as very funny but also very wise. The two are often twinned that way.
When I had told Rosenna back last summer that I was going to release my house, a big burden and way too much work especially given that my company had collapsed from no income, she thought,
That house isn't through with her yet.
She was right. The market shifted and changed, rapidly, and we had to remove the house from the market or chase bargain basement pricing until I was underwater with the mortgage.
So now, I have an empty house, a place of blank canvas which, as I have shared, is perfect as I face a brand-new decade. The house isn't through with me yet.
But wait, there's more.
That blank canvas also gets to be painted with what didn't sell at the consignment shop. I was laughing about this as I looked at my almost-real donkey, full-sized. The damned thing refused to sell. I loved it dearly and there it was, on final clearance, along with a few other gorgeous things which apparently really are mine.
Such as this piece of Goddess art:
I've got a few pieces from this artist. All of them speak directly to me as a woman of the woods and the wild. This goddess piece came back. Frankly, I'm glad to have her, for she is so evocative of how I feel about the woods that surround my house.
It's my job to trust that if the house isn't through with me, then some way to keep it will arise. Or, something else. I have no clue. That's also the message, to trust that while my plan may have made the Goddess giggle, something else is larger and heading my way.
It's terrifying because nothing I had planned turned out. My company folded, the plans to sell the house (for now) were upended, plans for a triumphant trip to Chile went sideways and left me injured. Which has invited me, like it or not, back to the house I had released, back to re-homing a few goods that were also released, all of which have returned.
It is sometimes very hard to release things.
When they come back, often uninvited, like my house and some of the things I wished had sold, that's sometimes even harder.
Some things simply choose us.
A way of life, a way of thinking or being. One writer constantly pens pieces of woe about being single and childless. That life chose her, but she hasn't embraced it, so it continues to be a source of misery. I am alone at nearly 70. That life chose me. I embrace it, for I don't exactly have a lineup of hot men at my doorstep.
This is about releasing the idiotic idea that we have control. Anyone doing Deep Work will remind you and me that we don't. What we do control is how we react to and feel about the circumstances we are given. We're never victims, for the choice to embrace what is in front of us is a lesson in true mastery.
Life chose you and me the moment we were born. All along the way we fool ourselves that we can change our destiny. Perhaps. We can make efforts, but if that life isn't for us, it will not manifest in our destiny. That lack of control induces holy terror in many. I've felt it plenty of times.
That terror almost always precedes some wonderful shift that I couldn't see coming, in part because my head was jammed into an unmentionable spot where no light exists, but there's an awful lot of crappy thinking.
Life chooses us. And in the best possible way, those things which return when released come back to us when we are far more ready to embrace them, for after they have gone, with luck we've grown.
If we haven't, then they come back, like that bad penny, to haul us into a lesson we just keep giving to the dog to chew.
No. It's ours.
I'm embracing mine.
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