Creating the Healing Place, Using Our Power

Big empty room.

Today was a lovely milestone day. We survived the days of taking down the bedroom setup in the third bedroom. Pete from the Used Furniture place came and took some of the stuff we had in there, and we donated the rest to the Salvation Army. Both were kind upon pickup. When the twin beds went out of there (which I thought we'd have in the house always) I sat on the ottoman in the living room and had to cry a little for a minute. Change is uncomfortable, but very very necessary.

After all the furniture was taken care of (sent off with prayers for prosperity, peace, and good health for the new owners of these items) I rolled up the Persian rug and we put it out on the curb. I had walked down the hallway a thousand times this past year, seeing that rug, knowing I could go into that room, but I would not find my Jess. The rug just held a lot of pain. So did the beds, as I had made them up with my heart in my throat before we went to get her and bring her home to heal. I had spread out all her new clothes on one bed, and gave her the task of taking the tags off, but she was too sick to even do that, so I did it for her.

I knew I could not live with that intense level of pain for very much longer, so we decided to change the purpose of the room. We had lots of really fabulous exercise equipment in the basement that I'd purchased over the years, but I never used it because our basement isn't dry and the air is musty/moldy. So we decided to bring it upstairs and convert the third bedroom into an exercise room.

Wow. What a day. I haven't felt this excited by anything in a couple of years. It felt so good to be heading into positive territory.

Grown-up toys!

My sister gave us a rug she wasn't using for the workout room, and it's just perfect. A little bit of softness and mood, which adds some warmth to the room. You can see parts of each lovely piece of equipment, including our treadmill, Crossbow, and Fluidity Bar, plus my little bouncer.

Rob's reviewing the manual for the Crossbow.

The treadmill stands by the window, a great place to walk to our hearts' content, and I was very pleased that I could download the manual for the Crossbow even after years of it sitting in the basement unused. Rob spent the afternoon swabbing everything down with Mr. Clean, and hooking things up, including our computer, which will play the coordinating DVDs and other really cool things we can download to make workouts fun.

It felt very special that though the morning began a bit wintry and wet, the sun came out just as my nephew and his friend arrived to help move everything, and it stayed out til just after they left. Magic. I so appreciated their patience and strength and safe maneuvering of all this equipment. Isn't it wonderful when our Earth Angels come to help us?

I got to rearrange the other spare room once the treadmill had been moved.

And as so often happens, when a project is being done in one room of the house, many other rooms get affected, so I spent my time rearranging the other little spare room once the treadmill was out of there, preparing for the arrival of the new queen-sized bed, and organizing things that hadn't been touched in years (CDs!). I rediscovered my wonderful music collection and had a good time moving things around. A side note to my West Coast and Far-Eastern thinking friends - I did some research on which direction is best for sleeping, thinking of Earth's magnetic fields and how the birds line up to orient themselves each day at sunset, how the fish and other animals navigate according to the magnetic fields, and discovered some very interesting information. I like to learn from ancient ways, so took in some Native American info on which directions are best to have your head when you sleep, and switched my bed accordingly. Now my head is pretty much southeast, which should be much better than the North, the direction I'd been sleeping for a couple of years - oops. Can't wait to see if it makes a difference.

Still a million more things to do, little details to take care of, finishing touches to put on the rooms, etc. I've decided to have the poster Alicia made using Jess's photo of Mt. Hood and the moon and the beautiful poem enlarged and will hang it in our workout room for inspiration.

For this I rise up.

All day in my head I had images of Jess and me laughing, several different instances over the years. I think she was sending them to me. One was the time we were driving across country, after the divorce, bringing my kids back East to raise them, and they were about 9 and 11 years old. They were excellent travelers, and we'd been driving for days. We stopped at a hotel one night and went into the restaurant for some dinner. The kids were so tired they were a bit punchy and got a fit of the giggles. I told them to quiet down because we were in a public place and their eyes got as big as saucers and they both looked at me with very wide grins and they said "but there's no one else here!" And it was true. The restaurant was completely empty. So we all broke into fits of giggles that we could hardly stop. That was one of the images she sent to me.

Another was when I lost the phone. You might have heard this story before. Jess and I were sitting outside in the pergola by the pool and it was dinnertime so I shook out my towel and slung it over my arm, got ready to go across the yard to the patio but realized I'd shaken the phone somewhere. I heard it thud. So I got down on my hands and knees and crawled around under the hostas looking for it. Didn't find it anywhere. And Jess said, "Oh I'll just call you Momma," so she did, and it rang. But it sounded way up high. And we realized that the phone had bounced out of the towel and straight up into the hanging basket that was over our heads, swinging from the top of the pergola. We cracked up laughing and I told her it probably would've been there for the whole winter if she hadn't thought to call me.

Another giggle fit we had was when we were hiking in Portland with Jess and somehow I ended up in the middle of a camera war. Jess was on one end and Rob on the other and they pointed their cameras at each other but I was in the middle and for some reason this struck our funny bones and we all cracked up laughing hysterically.

There was also a time when I put my sunglasses on my head and my hair stuck out all over the place and made Jess laugh like there was no tomorrow. She was a true gigglepuss all her life.

She was just sending me these images all day. Aren't I lucky. She knows it's the 10th and Momma has made a decision to step into her new world with a lighter heart. I will still cry. I will still miss her. But there's something healthy going on around that, and I think she approves.

Blessings to you and yours,
Namaste,
Jen