Clear

For the first time in four months, both the kitchen and the living room at 151 are clear. For all that time I’ve had piles of the reclaimed flooring in the living room and one work project after another in the kitchen. After the kitchen flooring went in, the kitchen immediately filled with the piles from the living room so I could work on the flooring in that space. After completing all of the flooring last week, I spent part of the weekend hauling out the leftover boards for storage in the garage. (I’ve one more landing place in mind for that flooring.) Then I gave both rooms a good vacuuming.

I love this feeling of a project being completed and the way it opens a space to its own uncluttered presence. The clearing offers a reset. It allows everything to settle to a baseline of being, both in the room and in me.

I sat on a chair in the living room, ate an apple, and gazed at the space.

It is in this clear state that the next thing will rise, and it quickly did. When I got up, I started work on adding wainscot and horizontal boards to part of the interior wall where the plaster had been removed. It was an obvious next step.

But as I moved on, I carried with me the calm from the clearing rather than the earlier weight of all that piled evidence of what needs to be done. In a long project like this, having this rhythm of clearing, these celebrations of completing, these moments of reset, are key to the work moving forward.

Love and Peace, Glenn