A Daring Adventure

I have been noticing the brave and wonderful journey of Carla Blazek as she navigates the storms of life in her blog Zena Musings. Today's Zena Musings featured my favorite quote by Helen Keller:

"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature."---Helen Keller

I am especially fond of the second line of this quote: "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all" and believe this with all my heart. I find it especially impacting that it was Helen Keller---who was blind, deaf, and mute---who wrote this.



Carla is moving to a new city and a new life, relocating her business without her husband and without her beloved canine companion of many years. She is so brave and authentic and very inspirational to me. She has the opportunity to recreate her identity and her life from scratch. So scary, too. A daring adventure.

Anyway, so on a much, much smaller scale, decluttering is recreating your life, and potentially, your identity. You are making your environment fit your current life and values. It is a creative act. Carla is involved in super-creation, but if you're decluttering, you are being creative. When I see decluttering like this it becomes fun instead of mind-numbing drudgery most of the time. Decluttering is reinventing your home to reflect who you are now.

Here is one of my challenges: to create a sacred space:

"You must have a room or a certain hour of the day or so where you do not know what is in the morning paper. A place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. At first you may think othing's happening. But if you have a sacred space and take advantage of it and use it every day, something will happen. Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again."---Joseph Campbell in Mariel Hemingway's "Healthy Living from the Inside Out"

Isn't this great? Mariel suggests ways that this can be done with limited finances and/or space. I love the idea of having a sacred space to come home to myself in on a daily basis. I have an informal area, but nothing intentional. I am particularly excited about this, and am right now working on my "nook", where I think I'm going to locate this sacred space. When I get it done, I'll post pictures of it.

Mariel's book is exceptional, wholistic, and comprehensive, and has been intrinsic to me in recreating my physical space, including my home, office, body, spirit, and diet. Her book has inspired me to restart my yoga practice. And I am "right ready" to tackle a major improvement in my diet, making it cleaner and healthier via the potpourri of ideas in the book.

So I plod, celebrate, drag my feet, move, dance, on with my decluttering project (see here and here for more), recreating my living space (and getting a big fat whopping tax deduction as well!)

~Picture of the rose from my cell phone