MOVING

"Let the beauty you love be what you do. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth."

                                                                                      Rumi

I just googled “most stressful life events and am disappointed to find that moving is not in the top ten. On one list, it’s number 28. While I was moving last month, a few people reminded me that moving is one of the most stressful things to go through. One of the top three, I was assured. And that gave me some encouragement.

I moved out of my home of almost 20 years, where I had raised my children. Part of the stress came from actually moving “stuff” and figuring out what to keep, what to store, what to give away or throw away. Time constraints brought another level of stress. Some guilt was part of the stress. Concern about Christmas morning. Concern about Muffy, my cat, who has spent his lifetime enjoying the wild outdoors of my old neighborhood. Maybe that sounds silly – nearly being willing to spend 364 extra days for a traditional Christmas morning and a happy cat. But those were the thoughts rumbling around in the still-dark early morning hours.

As the moving process began, it seemed that the walls were talking to me. That the very structure of the house had been storing our stories and history. My daughters’ bedrooms somehow showed me all the looks and moods they had witnessed – from diapers to Barbies to forts to Spice Girls to Facebook to . . . . The house reminded me of the dreams I had when I first moved in. The hopes that carried me – us – through the years. It also reminded me when those dreams didn’t come true.

Moving brought with it a shake-up of one level of security that I had come to take for granted. I was surprised to find out how much my “stuff” was giving me a sense of safety. It sounds a little absurd in the telling, but as I started sorting, giving away, throwing away the “stuff”, I found myself becoming spacey, absent-minded, ungrounded.

I felt very connected to my home and the land around it. I had a fire pit in my back yard that held meaning for me. It was in that physical place that I had stepped into my shamanic path and I had learned and grown there, at the fire, both alone and shared with a community of friends. Clearly it wasn’t the physical location that held the power or meaning but walking away from it stirred something.

Security. Stability. Foundation. The sense of feeling grounded and connected. All of these are fundamentally important. Important, too, to bring these to conscious awareness and be sure to build a strong, deep root structure for ourselves. To live in awareness of the truth that wherever we find ourselves standing is sacred ground.