Day 141/366 days Towards Self-Mastery
What I love most about living simply is the ease with which I move through each day. The steady pace of the day's activities, the deliberate tone of conversations, the unhurried movement through home-caring, the pottering in the garden, and the puttering around with creative pursuits.
Loving this particular section of Sarah's book as she writes a 2 page essay on the art of puttering.
It's difficult to putter when the days clutter remains on the kitchen sink, or the clean washing waits on the lounge to be folded and put away.
Puttering is reserved for those times when, as Sarah suggests, your home is a clean palette.
When the home-caring chores are done is the best time to engage in the solo pursuit of puttering around with your favourite expressions of creativity.
That could be rearranging the furniture in your home. The ornaments and family photos on my book shelves are in constant motion.
The art of puttering was restored when my son was very small. Children teach you, or do they remind you how to putter. You cannot hurry the observation of a flower or a butterfly that lands nearby. Exploring water holes and rock hopping, waiting for little crabs to reappear requires a puttering frame of mind.
Nowadays the areas I most like to putter with are the garden, and my craft kit.
When my soul needs to feel the earth, clear the cobwebs from my mind, rest my intellect and move my body there's no better place for me than the garden. Puttering in my garden has proved to be all that I've needed to do to maintained my gardens for decades. A day spent puttering around the compost bin, visiting the veggie garden, talking to the trees and attending to their needs can consume an entire day, to be completed with a deep warm bath scented with aromatic herbs, complemented with candlelight and a deeply felt sense of satisfaction.
More recently I've taken to puttering with my creative kit. New to me, exploring my creativity is a slow and emerging process. There's simply no way that creativity can emerge when you are overwhelmed with life so don't fall into the trap of thinking there's something wrong with you as I did for decades.
Forever, I've admired watercolour paintings with a hankering to learn how, yet always the task has seemed too big, too overwhelming. Finally I'm discovering a way to begin to explore this long-held desire. This well of self-expression that want to surface is leading the way.
Take the time to enjoy the true bliss of puttering. I want to giggle when I write that word. Puttering... it seems so old-fashioned, a lost art maybe, left in our childhood perhaps, yet deeply replenishing of the soul.
366 days Towards Self-Mastery
When I considered my New Year's intentions for 2020 I had just one: To allow my heart to love what it loved...and let it lead me. (If not now, then when?)
I've spent months working on integrating my life. To live life more fully with my home life, my interests, my work, my responsibilities, all coming together, all connected. I want to give each the attention that they desire and need, and still have time and energy for the others. That means living and working from the heart.
As I was clearing out my bookshelf over the Christmas break I discovered Simple Abundance. I set it aside to explore it on New Year's Day as I lazed through another delicious day of nothingness. Sarah, the author, says this book is about living in grace. Living in grace I realised, is about Self-Mastery.
My thirst for understanding the human condition has driven me all my life, and hand-in-hand with self-mastery it has been a life-long goal. And seeing as I love to write, that living in grace is about self-mastery, and I love a bit of a challenge, then if I am truly going to let my heart lead, I really don't have any other choice. So scary as it feels, I'm starting out on a daily mission of leaning into the suggestions of this daybook and making a daily post to keep me accountable. If not now, then when?
I'm Josie. You can find out a little more about me here.
Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy: by Sarah Ban Breathnach.
This book is written for the Australian and NZ market because it refers to seasonal changes. It's available on Amazon here if you'd like to follow along.
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