I just did something I haven’t done in quite a while. I deleted my post. Well, it wasn’t technically a post yet, since I didn’t publish it. But it was pretty close. And now it’s gone. I think it’s a bit eerie, to be honest: I’m becoming ruthlessly adept at clearing stuff out if it doesn’t suit me – if it doesn’t fluff my nest.
And that’s how I’ve felt about my home, lately, too. My nest has desperately needed a good fluffing, and while I am getting close, I haven’t yet manifested the space to give it my all.
As I’ve occasionally mentioned, I’ve been on a kick for the past three or four weeks, clearing out, letting go, donating. It’s the strangest thing. As hard as it is for me to go through stuff, I inevitably want to throw out more when I quit for the day.
An Actual Nest
When I was driving down River Road today, I was reminded of how compelled I’ve felt lately to clean the clutter from our home and truly streamline our environment. The massive eagle’s nest that’s nestled high in a gigantic sycamore tree across the Delaware, is a sight to behold.
I couldn’t quite tell if I was seeing a head peeking out over the edge of the nest when I went by this afternoon. But it made me think of my nest.
Karl and I entirely emptied out one of the rooms in our home over the past few days. Top to bottom, that part of our nest is empty. And it feels sooooo great.
I’m ready to see what’s going to happen as we totally revamp our intentions for this room. Will it bring the changes we seek? Will it inspire me to do the same in other rooms of our nest?
Only time will tell, I guess. But today was a very good day, from my nest to Eagle’s nest. The view is feeling fine.
I’m sitting here in my living room, my front door open to let in the sounds and cool breeze of the spring evening. I’m tired. My back aches. A car just drove by. One of only a handful the whole evening, it seems – and it made me realize just how eerily quiet the night is tonight. I can count on one hand the number of cars that have whooshed by. It’s almost as if the world’s finally stopped thrashing about and is ever so tentatively slowing down and taking a breath.
I spent a while in our attic this afternoon trying to clear out some old stuff that just needs to go. What am I saving this stuff for? I find myself asking this question ad nauseum lately. My need to dramatically shake stuff up is acute. Not just in the attic. Everywhere in my life.
I’m not sure what’s driving it, but the urgency feels relentless.
I’d like to note that spending any amount of time in the attic is back-torturing work because it’s literally impossible to stand up straight anywhere up there. There’s probably a metaphor there that I’m either missing or choosing just barely subconsciously to ignore. Either way, I was willing to endure the discomfort and push myself onward – until the lights went out.
Lights Out
<<Blink>> Out they went. I’d just sat down to rest on a stored sleeping bag after using the shop-vac to suck up the relentless detritus created by a very old slate roof. It didn’t matter that the sun was out and it was early afternoon. Only slivers of natural light illuminate our attic on the best of days, and sadly that’s because random hailstones have put a few small holes in our slate roof, which we’ve repaired with translucent caulk. We have a couple of windows, but they’re very small and very dirty and they just weren’t designed to provide an abundance of light in our attic.
So when the lights went out, I was in the dark. The message was clear: it was time to get out. I’d done what I could in this venue.
Shifting My Focus
Begrudgingly, I lugged a very long, industrial-grade, extension cord back down the spiral, pie-shaped staircase leading from the attic into our bedroom. The stupid cord, an ungainly length, hadn’t worked anyway. I was going to have to test it because I’d wasted an inordinate amount of time trying to get the shop-vac to work, only to reach the irritating conclusion that none of this might not be the shop-vac’s fault, even though I’d been mercilessly cursing the appliance under my breath.
Turned out it was the extension cord. Who’s ever heard of such a thing? How many times have you heard of an industrial grade extension cord ‘going bad?’ Maybe it happens all the time. I don’t know. But I can tell you: it irked the heck out of me today.
After gathering up the 25’ cord and stuffing it into a garbage bag, I shifted my focus (some would call it the Eye of Sauron) toward our barn. Surely there was something in there I could pitch. (Ha – I scoff at the mere suggestion I’d have to do anything more than open a door before discovering items that could be banished from the premises forthwith.) Oooh yeah. Plenty of stuff to either resurrect or purge. This has been a long time coming – and today felt as good a day as any to end the madness.
A Sense of Urgency
More and more, I’m realizing how desperately we (I) need to do this. And we (I) need to do this now. Freeing up our (my) psychic and physical space is going to make more of a dramatic difference in our lives than anything else we could do at this moment in time. (And even if it’s only my psychic space that’s cleared – that will unquestionably impact Karl’s life as well.)
As quiet as the outside world seems tonight, I sense the same is attainable for my inner environment. If I stop thrashing and persist in doing the work to shed the remnants of hopes fulfilled and then forgotten – or never attained, perhaps I’ll finally have room to manifest the ones that matter to me now.
Nope; not yet. But when it does arrive – at 6:45 a.m. EDT on Thursday, May 7th, 2020 – we will be enjoying what’s known as the Full Flower Moon.
I just thought I’d give everyone a little heads up. After all, who wants to miss a full moon whose name conjures images of abundant bouquets of heady-scented, multi-hued blossoms?
Sometimes I wish I could smell the colors of some of the flowers we encounter on our walks. Take these precious little gems sunning themselves beside the creek that flows parallel to our road:
Wildflowers – Photo: L. Weikel
Moon Shadows – Already
As Karl and I walked early this evening, our eyes kept getting drawn toward the waxing moon above our heads. Of course, as we continued along our trek and the sun disappeared completely behind a bank of dark slate gray clouds on the horizon, she became brighter and more brilliant with each passing minute.
By the time we reached home, our forms – and everything around us, especially the trees – cast sharp, unmistakable shadows. And this with two and a half days left until she reaches her fullest expression!
I don’t know what it is that makes me catch my breath every time I see them, but there’s something magical about moon shadows. When I am lucky enough to be outside when the moon casts her brilliance powerfully enough, joy bubbles up and I feel what I can only describe as childlike delight. Magic.
I took the photo above early in our walk tonight – well before the sun even approached the horizon. Something tells me, if we’re lucky to escape cloud cover over the next few nights, we’re in for some serious urges to howl.
A Little Forethought
Remember, full moons are the perfect time to release those feelings, thoughts, or perspectives on circumstances that have maxed out on their usefulness in our lives. As Grandmother Moon is already beaming her message of reflection to us in these days preceding her technical fullness, perhaps she’s encouraging us to spend a little bit of this Covid-19 isolation reflecting on what might not be working for us anymore.
Is there an attitude, a belief, a perspective on life that we used to hold very dear (and which may have worked well enough), but which might not serve us anymore as we adjust to a vastly different world? Is there a rigidity lurking somewhere within ourselves that we might release, perhaps by symbolically blowing it into a tiny stick and willingly sacrificing to a full moon fire?
Intention is Everything
Remember, a full moon fire can be as simple as a tea candle on a dish. The power of any ritual rests in our intention.
Perhaps we can take advantage of the next day or two to reflect on what we’ve experienced ‘enough’ of and wish to release. This month’s Full Flower Moon is arriving at a time when most of us are realizing that this – all of this, this new reality – is, indeed, real. And perhaps here to stay for a lot longer than any of us would’ve believed a month or two ago.
If we’re going to slow down and revel in the beauty and aroma of the flowers that are only starting to bloom in our lives, perhaps we better first clear out the dead beliefs about how things are.
Every once in a while we’ve had an opossum show up in our yard. I’m pretty sure I’ve written about a time when Spartacus barreled out our kitchen door and ran right over one, causing it to roll toward a car parked in the driveway. It was amusing at the time – mostly because both animals seemed so surprised (and neither got hurt).
Recently, however, there’s been an opossum hanging out underneath our bird feeders under the cover of darkness. I described for you last night our most recent up-close-and-personal encounter with it, when we surprised the critter by returning home from a walk in the dark.
Old News
As I described in my post the other night, our opossum truly is a first class thespian. Upon encountering it, both Karl and I were absolutely convinced was dead. It was sprawled on its side, its mouth open, exposing its glinting sharp teeth. To add to its master play, its tongue was hanging out. Although I didn’t detect an odor, Spartacus was clearly sniffing at something weird in the air.
The two photos in this post are what I managed to take in a single shot, because it was so deftly scurried to safety after taking me by surprise by sitting up and pointedly (no pun intended) looking at me.
But What’s the Message?
The night that all of this took place, when we unexpectedly (to the opossum) returned from a walk and surprised it, I had to write about the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter in the night sky.
When I then attempted to write about our opossum encounter last night, I became exceedingly frustrated by the fact that all of a sudden my laptop was telling me I was maxing out on my memory. Apparently it was hitting the wall. Apparently the hard drive becoming full was reaching such an apex that, as Apples are wont to do, when I tried to even just log into the computer or open a document, all I saw was a swirling rainbow circle spinning minute after minute. Literally. I was unable to do anything on my MacBook Air.
I had to laugh at my internal reaction. It upset me! I’d been faithfully writing my posts on this laptop since around the eighth day into this 1111 Devotion. That meant I’d written 371 consecutive posts on this laptop, and I did not want to change my routine. (Wow.)
Suddenly, it occurred to me that this was somehow a reflection of the lesson Opossum was here to teach me: STRATEGY.
Too Much Stuff
I’ve most definitely been feeling a need to sort and discard. My environment is begging me for attention. And there it was: right in my face.
I could not upload the photo of my prehistoric little friend because I had too much stuff on my laptop. So… I needed to employ some strategy. OK, I thought, I am not going to let this throw me off track. I’ll use my Dell for the blog – just this once.
Thwarted
That, too, became a task fraught with obstacles. First of all, I downloaded the two photos I’d made from the single ‘live’ photo I’d taken with my iPhone. Oh, let me tell you, I was so proud of myself for having figured out how to isolate the frames and keep the two most distinct as separate photos.
Imagine my supreme irritation, then, when I tried to download this onto my Dell – and could not, for the life of me, find the folder in which the photos were being stored. I know; I know. Sounds simple. Probably is simple. But I simply could not figure it out last night.
Then – oh my. A message popped up on my Dell. I could not believe my eyes when I realized it was telling me I had precious little hard drive space left on it, too.
Opossum ‘waking up’ – Photo: L. Weikel
A Consistent Message
I have to admit, it’s time for me to clean out the clutter. Be it in my bureau drawers or in my creative outlets (my laptops), clearly too much ‘stuff’ is muddying up the flow. I need to create a strategy to help myself.
And the consistency is holding with the messenger as well. Not only did I see it the night it seemingly fainted dead away. I also saw it both last night and tonight!
Frankly, I’m astonished by this. When we got home from our walk this evening, for instance, Cletus was sitting on the porch just watching the Opossum eating stuff it was finding under the bird feeder. And the dogs…they seem to smell it, but also don’t seem to care much about it anymore. It’s sort of become ‘one of the gang.’ (I do need to say that we try to be very careful when letting the dogs out for their final evening tinkle. I’ve walked onto the porch and told it to go home three straight nights now!)
For now, though, I’m happy to report that I removed a bunch of redundant photos from my MacAir and it seems to at least not be getting stuck on the whirling rainbow any more. Phew. I still need a strategy to cull the herd here in the house, though.
