Yesterday I dropped off 12 boxes of 'Stuff': mixing bowls, measuring cups, art supplies, towels, glass food storage containers, bedding, vases...so many little things that make up a home. I felt such relief at getting rid of this 'stuff'
and then a few hours later i felt this wave of deep emotion move through me.
All of this stuff, it was love. Some of it was long ago wedding presents I realized to my shock. Someone who took the time and money to help J and I create a home together. Measuring cups. And those measuring cups lived in Santa Cruz, Watsonville and Seattle. They were used by us, by my tenants, and then by me. I used them to make thanksgiving pies for our families, our friends and then years later, post divorce on a rainy thanksgiving in Seattle I spent a beautiful day alone and stayed up until 3am baking. Using these measuring cups, using this love. Using resources from Mother Earth to feel loved and to create love.
So yesterday, it wasn't just stuff dropped off. It was a big part of my history, of love, it was these parts of myself that had tried SO SO hard to be a wife, to want children, to have a beautifully decorated home on Queen Anne, to want to stay in one place and thrive. To want to be a CEO, have a business card with a title that people respected. It was this part of me that had tried to be loved, believing this is who I had to be, to be loved. It was this part of me that adapted to believing this is what it took to be loved.
When it isn't.
My wild wants out. It wants to not have so much stuff right now, it doesn't want to be a wife in the way that was laid out to me, it never wanted babies and felt such intense shame around that. What kind of woman am i, if I don't want children? Who am I if I don't want all these things around me that declare, this is who I am.
What if in my rawness there is more to me than being surrounded by all these old ideals of who I had to be to be loved?
And so yesterday when I dropped off those things, I was also releasing myself from those values, from that agreement I had made so long ago to adapt, to domesticate, to tamp down my wild, to deny it, to shove it aside, to make it wrong. It was a huge moment of reclamation. The physical declaration of a commitment to myself to live my truth. For me. Here are these things that no longer serve my highest good. That are no longer my truth, perhaps they never were. Thank you for them. Thank you and now I trust they will go to a good home and be loved. And I trust I am being ever so gently held as I continue to come back home to my beautiful, sacred self.