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This photo captures one of my favorite moments in the past week. I’ve been feeling my way through honoring of the festival of Vestalia…choosing a room to focus on and uncluttering and refining within its walls each day. The kitchen took two days, in short periods of attention between work hours. When I got to the woodstove corner, after clearing away the ashes and wood bits and hearth-keeping tools for the season, I was inspired enough to get down on my knees and scrub…and wipe up the sooty suds…and scrub some more.

A little while later, inhaling the smell of damp brick and tile and wood, I felt a kinship with the Vestal Virgins of long ago and their sacred task at this festival time, but more nearly with the women throughout the ages, for whom hearth-scrubbing and keeping was a part of everyday home-life.

I had been looking at the dusty little piles underneath the woodstove for longer than I want to admit. Vestalia beguiled me into finally choosing to take out the broom and scrub brush and perform my domestic ceremonial. Thinking on it since, I’ve realized that the old ways…traditions…high days and holy days…rituals…or banner days (as I like to call them) have become a sort of tool for me. I learn of one…like Vestalia…and tho’ I am not into Roman history or culture or religion…a facet of it touches me. The light of it then reflects upon something that needs illuminating in my mind, my heart, my days. Thoughts of Vesta flowed into what I know of her Greek counterpart, Hestia-goddess of the hearth. And the focus that honoring and celebrating can bring was just what I needed, to more lovingly tend the home that has gotten rather short shrift in recent days for all of the usual reasons.

The enchantment petered out today when those usual reasons…work complications…headache…others needing tending…dampened the ceremonial spirit. But it may come ’round again tomorrow, and if it does, I will be there to gently wield it into a little more peace and brightness within our temple-home.

I mentioned a few of those ideas last week and one, at least,  has been moving from altar to creation…a natural process when everything is in place to allow it. My beloved Abbie Graham expressed it this way…

“No person gets the proper mileage out of an experience till he has expressed it in some form of art, or has felt it satisfactorily expressed by some artist. Art is the completion of experience.”

Ideas and the paths they take are experiences to me, and so much of everyday life is art. Sometimes my “completions” look like a photograph or diary entry or meal. Others unfold in different ways…

Sufficiency is one of my North Stars, tho’ I too often lose sight of it. I had a funny and perhaps common unfolding of events a few weeks ago. I became more aware than ever of the stultifying effects of too much online time. Sometimes it isn’t even so much a time-thing but a room-in-ones-mind thing. And this awareness was not just my own, but a part of many conversations, online and off.

I’m good at paring down, cyclically at least, and had no trouble letting go of contacts and followings until it all felt restful again. But it is about more than numbers, and I knew that I needed some supportive ways to move into a feeling of sufficiency with it all.

Hints and pieces of a possible project began to grow…a name…ingredients…a hashtag. When I looked it up to see if it was in use, I found that indeed it was, for I had written the phrase on my own blog in January…and forgotten about it. But isn’t that an apt reflection of the too-much we often take in online?

I felt humorously chastened, and from that moment, many little ideas fell into place and I could see my next steps. Sometime next month, I will be creating the first of a series of workbooks/guides/companions on various topics dear to my heart. A  Sweet  Sufficiency (with online life) will be the first subject. And tho’ my inclination was to make these in e-course form or something similar, I soon realized how counter-intuitive that would be. So tho’ I haven’t manifested any pages beyond my those in my head, I can see the lovely little booklets filled with hand-drawn elements and text, slipped into a hand-addressed and stamped envelope, ready to be opened and written in and progress made…task by task.

There will be an experimental version available to Wisteria & Sunshine members in a week or two around a new project there I am calling   Summer Dwelling…encouragement, prompts and tasks to help us in creating the home atmosphere we seek for the summery months.

I am excited about it all…new ways to bring pen to paper and quiet, delightful moments away from screens…supporting the post office…weaving thoughtful threads of connection…

Another project finally coming into being, after months of consideration, has sufficiency at its heart, too. For there is no area of my life where the feeling of sufficiency is challenged more often than in trying to find my way in business. And after too many times finding that I’d wandered off of my own path, I’ve found some clear signposts and maps to follow now…know which paths to turn away from…have discovered some ways and places to rest and find useful tools…so many things.

I’ve learned how helpful and rare it is to find a place, a gathering that supports simplicity…intuition…naturalness…especially in business. I’ve been “holding space” for this at Wisteria & Sunshine for years now and will be adding a new room there in the near future, to explore it all in regards to our own dear businesses.

Rosehips are the fruit of a rose’s long growth. Its seeds are full of nourishment. It signifies potential and wisdom. The idea of  Rosehip Business has been growing in my heart and mind long enough. A few days ago, I took the first steps to creating its walls and rooms. And in a very real sense, it is an “extension” of Wisteria & Sunshine’s guiding idea…that of wild simplicity.

Wild Simplicity at work…

Here is a signup page to be emailed on the day the doors are open, tho’ I will share news and glimpses, here and in my newsletter, as they are nurtured into being…

“Dwell in the sufficiency of what you already have…your home, your things, your people. Pay attention, nourish, appreciate…and you become a more productive instrument for the world.”

-Lynne Twist