THIS IS GOOD!
even if it doesn't feel like it right now
Dear friend,
As I type this, our sweet life is as wild as ever. I’ve got ten pounds of cooked chicken in the refrigerator that’s waiting to be turned into enchiladas and chicken salad for a weekend away with my whole family, I can see a whole basket worth of ripe, red raspberries from my office window, we need to bury a sweet little quail that we (tried) to rescue from our cat, and my phone is alerting me that it’s time to work out. Again.
Life hasn’t gotten any smoother for us as of late. Yet somehow, it has gotten better.
In a sweet phone conversation with a dear friend, one navigating her own challenging season of life, I offered what comfort I was capable of which mostly looked like empathy. “I recognize how you feel” can traverse vast chasms of distance and circumstance.
Each change, each purposeful “elevation” towards (something more? peace? joy? acceptance? growth?) feels minuscule, so microscopic in weight that you wonder how it can stand up to the behemoth that is hardship. Such efforts can feel like dripping water into a pond — pointless and ineffectual. BUT THERE’S GOOD NEWS.
Such efforts are far from purposeless. With each load of laundry, each made bed, each walk in the fresh air, each purposeful meal, and each piece of life cared for, the tides begin to shift. You’ll feel it. Somehow, such actions unwind the coils that we unintentionally hold so tight.
Ooh — and make sure you stay to the end so that you can see the kitchen cabinet transformation (and don’t judge me for the before… yikes!) While all these actions seem small, together, they create something in our homes far greater than each individual piece. They magically weave together to form a sweet life indeed and help us feel better in our skin and in our spaces. Tell me — what does this look like for you?
Have a blessed weekend, my friends.
Love,
Beautiful Shaye! The bedroom as your place of rest is so important. That is the one room I try to prioritize first in the household. When the room is tidy and the bed is made, it takes a little weight off my shoulders. Leila Lawler from The School for Housewives recently wrote about this... Leave the kitchen to sort itself out, place your bedroom as the space to first start cleaning because it will be there, ready for you, at the end of the day.
Why do we KNOW these things— but yet we forget them so easily? I know the joy that will spark when I walk into our bedroom at night to a made bed. Yet— some mornings it seems like asking me to carry all three of my children on my back to the grocery store and back when I think about making it 😆