Change

I was channeling my mother this week.

My mom has a gift for arranging things and making them look good. She has an eye for balance and color and style and can whip up a beautiful bouquet out of WEEDs found on the side of the road. She's always done this. She tinkers with her space constantly. Growing up I would hear my dad complain on the morning after coming home from a business trip that he bumped his knee on the sofa/table/lamp in the night because my mom rearranged the furniture. again. Every time I come to visit her, the first thing I do is walk through the house to see what is different, to see what she had shifted or switched out or brought out from the depths of her storage to have a new life on the shelf or wall.

This is the mantle display she did this year.



She will hang a picture on the fireplace and you will think that it is the BEST picture to hang on the fireplace EVER! because of the colors or the subject or something and you will be in awe of how perfect it seems there. Until you come the next time and she's hung a quilt there instead, and IT is the perfect thing to be on the fireplace.

These things are easy for her. Part of her makeup. She does it all the time.


I think it is a dormant gene in me until a situation arises and then it pops up and I swing into action arranging those flowers/pictures/teapot display like nobody's business and then it goes dormant again.

It hit me this week as I was visiting with a friend and we were standing in her kitchen and she was lamenting how tired she was of looking over into the playroom and seeing all the toys out and having to walk through them to get to the laundry room and I popped up and said: "maybe you should move your playroom into the dining room and move your dining room in here!"

We talked about it for a moment and then I said, "Let's just move the table in here NOW!"

3 1/2 hours later we had rearranged her entire house. Loveseat goes here, bookshelves go there. Bring in the plant from over there to here. And it really had been transformed - we could feel how the whole energy of the house had changed and we were amazed and surprised. It looked totally different and it felt really really good.


That experience made me think about change.
I could tell my friend was a little hesitant to try out the dining room in the new place, she was unsure. It's like that in our personal lives too, isn't it? Something happens in our life, an opportunity comes along or you have to make a big decision and we hesitate, unsure of this change, afraid to move forward, because it is a change and that can be scary because it is unknown. But like with my friend, once we moved that huge, heavy dining room table (even getting it totally stuck in the kitchen for awhile) once we did that, everything else fell easily into a new place.

I'm looking forward to making some changes and letting things fall easily into place this year.