spend 15 minutes every day decluttering and decorating my apartment until it is exactly how I want it!

Our dwellings reflect our inner world. My dwellings have always been in a state of flux because I am always in a state of flux. I may be physically languid, but I’m emotionally and spiritually energetic. I’ll still be on regular clutter control, but I am coming to the realization that what I really need to do is get rid of a lot of STUFF that I have and don’t love. So a big sweep and sale of books and CDs is in order, along with banishing from the house any piece of clothing that makes me feel less than goddessy. I also have a fair amount of old meds and toiletries that can go, along with snippets of this and that waiting to be part of a collage someday. If I haven’t collaged in a year, it’s time for those pieces to go. I want lots of open space in my apartment. Breathing room.

has again taken over the couch, coffeetable, big chair, side table, desk and studio floor. Today I’ll work on getting the old magazines and mail recycled or trashed. We did a thorough cleaning of Mr. Man’s place for his party on Saturday and it looks and smells divine now.

During our Radical Reinvention call last night, Debbie Ford talked about how the internal and external affect each other. She asked us to come up with three characteristics that we would need in order to achieve our dream. Then she asked us to look at our lives through the lens of those characteristics and see where the mess was. I know that I need honesty, faith and courage to be a great writer.

The email sent out before the call started with a sentence about how our external environment influences us. I read it in the morning as I was putting on my makeup. I snuck a peek, read that sentence and then curled my eyelashes. I thought, “I need to clean my desk.” Then I read the next sentence, which asked us to find one area of our lives that needed to be cleaned and clean it. I got the answer before she even asked the question!

My desk is where I do a lot of my writing. It is disrespectful to my writing self to have it in chaos. I realized that I was hiding under all those scraps of paper, that they represented all the times that I didn’t trust my inner ear and wanted an external authority to tell me that I was a good writer, that I was doing it right, that I had the right to write. They represented all the ways that I had distracted myself from writing, that I had let others define beauty for me and tell me what I should desire.

So I sorted and trashed and arranged. I’m not done yet and I want to get everything filed, but it definitely looks better. I moved a sorter that was buried under a wooden pencil box and a metal lunchbox into the kitchen. I’ll sort all the recipes, food articles and cooking tips that I tear out of magazines into manila folders and keep them on the side table instead of in a mess on top of the fridge.

The word “respect” keeps coming through as I clean. I want my surroundings to reflect the respect that I have for myself as a person and an artist. I want to welcome myself into my home the way I would welcome a newborn, with comfort and beauty and love. Seen from this perspective, cleaning becomes necessary and even pleasurable. Welcome home, Me!

It’s so simple. When my big green monster chair is clean, I sit in it and write. That’s what I did last night. That’s what I’ll do tonight. I also sketch, read, journal and daydream in that chair.

Using the big beach tote bag for all the magazines and books that I’m currently reading, with the exception of the HUGE vegetarian cookbook, is working well to keep my couch clean.

I want my desk! Okay, it’s Mr. Man’s desk and he hasn’t gotten the replacement desk yet…but that’s because he hasn’t made arrangements to pick it up and followed through with them. I cleaned out the space for it in the studio and now I want to get it in there and organized.

I want to tackle my storage closet next. There is a box of Christmas stuff that is the last bit of husband/memory material I haven’t sorted. It’s like an emotional bomb, ticking away on the shelf. Not fun. It would also be nice if I had the sheets and towels on the shelves in such a way that pulling one off didn’t send several of its companions to the floor.

I wrestled the table apart and moved the bottom, which is an incredibly heavy porcelain sink, out of the path that the boys will use to move in my new desk. Whew! Now all I have to do is rearrange everything once the desk is in the studio, but that will be fun. This is a proper desk with drawers, unlike the table I use now and will continue to use for work/chore stuff. The desk will be for writing and creative work. What luxury!

My previous work on this goal has purposely ignored my studio, since I like a little mess to spur my creativity. Then I started shifting all the mess to the studio. Now that I’ve got this desk to move in, I’m finally attacking the studio mess and it feels good. The living room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom are all in pretty good shape, so as soon as I’ve got that one big print framed and the studio in shape, it will just be a matter of cleaning out the three closets and then maintaining the tidiness.

Mr. Man’s messy apartment has taught me how important it is for me to live in a clean and tidy place. Mess stresses me out. After a few more weeks, I might actually be able to mark this goal as done!

I just remembered that I need to get the incredibly heavy table out of the corner of the studio and clear it out so the boys can move my new desk in this weekend. Ohhh, boy. I guess this means I will be throwing all the chaos in a new corner, at least temporarily. I don’t see me having the energy or time to get it organized. What the bloody hell am I going to do with the base of the table, which is a porcelain sink painted bright red? I guess I’ll store it in the corner of the kitchen until the next big trash pickup. Worth it to have two desks, one that’s exclusively for writing.

I’m so glad I took down the odd piece of plastic covering the bathroom window. The natural light and treetop view make it so much nicer to take a shower. I also took four boxes of books to the used bookstore. I got $11 cash and $190 in store credit. So everyone I know is getting books for their birthdays! They also sell DVDs and CDs.

Now I want to rearrange the books that I have left to see if I can have one whole shelf that’s nothing but art and office supplies so my studio can be a bit tidier. I need to figure out what to do with the sink that’s the base of a table in the studio. I’ll be getting a desk from Mr. Man as soon as he picks up his new one. On that desk I plan to set up the desktop computer, printer, and scanner. That will be my writing desk and the other will be my daily business desk.

I’d like to get rid of even more books but it’s difficult to let them go. I gave a bunch of Shakespeare lit crit books to someone in Mr. Man’s band who teaches Shakespeare. I want to be truly ruthless in the next go-round. I still need to get my living room in shape. I kind of miss my apartment. I definitely need to spend more time there. We’ve fallen into the habit of always going to Mr. Man’s place.

I did some major nesting yesterday. I filed a ton and got rid of some old records. I went through my books and have three boxes to sell or give away. I took down the odd piece of hinged plastic that was blocking my bathroom window, cleaned off the ledge and hung windchimes. I went around the house gathering all the pieces of paper that were breeding and threw most of them away. I even got some of the junk off my desk. I also distributed the little crystal skulls that I bought on Saturday. One in the shower, one in the kitchen, one on my computer and two in the car to bring to work. Those all seemed like good places to be reminded of my mortality, that whatever it is that I want to do needs to be done or begun now, as now is the only time I’ve got.

There’s a lot more to be done but I’ve got momentum now. Next I want to get the book boxes in my car and work on framing the print I want to hang in the bedroom. I want to find the clothes that need to be altered or repaired and get those in to the tailor. I need to get rid of the table my husband and I made out of a porcelain sink that we painted bright red and a piece of plexiglass that we fastened to the top. It’s heavy and bulky and I just missed bulk pick-up.

I also bought a 50’s white cotton apron at a yard sale, along with a 40’s silk negligee. $6 for the pair. I hate that my friends won’t be living here much longer but I love that they’re following their dream…and selling their cool stuff!

Mmmm…just made my bed when I went home for lunch. Cinnamon on the mattress and vanilla on the headboard. I just need to put lavendar essential oil on the pillows and I’ll have a lovely retreat.