Rescued

Chris is, on a fairly regular basis, my hero. He rides in to save me when things are sad, or frustrating, or overwhelming.

While I was at a DFW Fiber Fest meeting yesterday afternoon, he started clearing out the junk from my studio room upstairs. It doesn’t make everything magically better – but having that space clear is helping a LOT. I can see my desk. I actually sat down at it this morning and pretended like I was OK, imagined sitting in the chair and weaving or stitching or writing an article. It felt good. I feel like I can see OK from here.

I’m going through and making piles for discarding and donating. I’m going to have to find someone who wants to take all the stuff I’m clearing out, but not throwing away – more on that in a separate post.

Right now, our bedroom is totally socked in with stacks of boxes, and I’m clearing through them as fast as I can. Some of them go in big bursts – boxes where I know that they’re “all good,” or things that I use for classes and demos, etc., I can just wipe down and move back. But there are a LOT of boxes with old stuff, things I found at garage sales and never got around to making that cool project with, stuff that seemed like a good idea at the time. This is the stuff that has been sitting on top of my “good” stuff, and helping to keep me down. I’m getting rid of it with vigor and enthusiasm. It feels really good, very therapeutic. I want to reduce the total volume by about 70%, which I think should get me to a point where the boxes are mostly storing stuff that I will access and use on a regular basis. I’m certainly not getting rid of all my supplies – I’m just trying to go from “Sweetie, you realize this is a problem” to “Gosh, you’ve got a lot of neat stuff.”

And in one of those little synchronicity moments – I have caterpillars hatching. I did not expect these until March, and so I hadn’t cleaned the eggs out of the cage, which was piled in with the rest of the mess. But now, I have tiny caterpillars, and thanks to Chris, they are getting to eat leaves on a clean table in a spacious clean room. Life coming out of the emotional compost. I sat last night and transferred them to fresh oak leaves with a paint brush. Thank you, Punkin, for always saving me.