Cleaning Your Soul

I know this is going to sound very old school but I'm going to come out with it anyway: sometimes if I want to feel better, I pull out the cleaning supplies and take a room apart.

I fill a pan with hot soapy water, gather some rags and a few spray cleaners and I then I go for it!

Over the weekend, I did this to my kitchen because something about the change in seasons was in the air and I looked around and thought I would feel better if I could clean away some of the dirt and also toss out some unused or broken items taking up space.



My Healing Tools

Everybody has dirt in the place where they live whether they admit it or not.  It's just what happens while you are living life; especially in a room made for cooking and preparing food.

From the ceiling to the baseboards and all those little spaces in between where you don't see the dirt until you are on a stepladder and up close and personal with it, I felt productive.  Cleaning is physical work and exercise produces endorphins -- those natural chemicals in the brain that are responsible for creating good moods.

As I wiped down the kitchen walls and physically cleaned the knobs of the appliances and other things hanging on the walls, I lost myself in the motion of it and that was a good thing.  I could feel that I was getting rid of some of the stresses of the work week by wiping and vacuuming and squeezing out those rags in the water over and over again.

Rather than waiting for change in your life, you can be the agent of change!

The simple act of moving furniture around or cleaning your kitchen or reorganizing your closet can freshen your attitude.  Think of how much time you spend in your house and how much it means to you.  It's your haven.  Your comfort zone.

When you decide to change your environment, you make it different.  Let go of the way a room used to be arranged and try it the way you want.  Even if you clean a room and put everything back exactly where it was, it still looks different because it sparkles and feels fresher.

In cleaning, you are simplifying your space, getting rid of what you don't want.

You may think that cleaning is gross -- and it can be -- but it's also about changing up your living space, the special place where you and your inner spirit live.

Falling Into Fall

Photo By Eileen Milner

Early this morning I opened the front door to get the newspaper and felt a chill in the air that can mean only one thing:  the seasons are starting to change and I don't like it.

Summer is my very, very favorite season of the year.  It is totally the best!  I know, I know, I hear lots of you out there saying something garbled about the heat and humidity in DC, but I don't care.  Summer is light clothing, fresh fruits and vegetables and long days.  Summer is bare feet, freshly cut grass and beach time.  My thinking about summer is: Bring It.  The hotter the better.  Temperatures below 75 degrees are cold and unwelcome.

But besides the change in temperature, I also don't like the emotional shift that I feel happens when we pass from the month of August to the month of September.  Maybe it's a holdover childhood days of leaving summer and going back to school in September, but I feel it's something more.  What is it about the change of seasons that thows my thoughts in a tumble?  It's almost similiar to saying good-bye and I guess in a way that's what I'm doing.

I'm saying good-bye to a time of the year that makes me really happy.  I'm saying good-bye to a sense of freedom and relaxation even though I'm really not ready to say hello to a time of year that brings shorter days, cooler climates, and the holidays.  Today, I saw pumpkins in the grocery store and I wanted to cover them up.  Mother Nature is forging ahead, working her magic while she moves us into another time of the year and in that process, I am thinking about how I'll have to start wearing a coat, how I need to clean up the yard and what my husband is doing.  Every year I think I'm going to stop feeling that way and I don't.  I know that for me autumn is harder than spring but I think that has to do with the fact that he died in November.

It could be that in the transition from one season to the next I am thinking about how I don't want it to get cold outside, how I don't want it to snow and as I am thinking, I tend to let my mind wander which leads me to thinking about him.  He is still in and out of my thoughts depending on what is happening in the world, what is happening to me at work, what is happening to our son at college or what is happening to his four other children as they make their way through life.

It's so funny how my son and I try to figure out when events happened by whether his Dad was alive or not when they occurred.  What year did that happen?  I don't know...Was Daddy alive then?  He was?  Okay, then it must have been 2002.

I wonder about how he is and if he would like the person I have become now that he is gone.  Maybe I just don't like winter because he liked it.