Room of my own

I was fierce today. Like a mother protecting her cubs.

Only I was protecting my turf: my weekly time in my art studio that so often gets eaten up by something else. Today I stood firm and didn't let it. I just couldn't.

I give in too often, but not today. Why was today so important? I'm not sure, but I journaled about my reaction and discovered this is the place I feel most safe to be who I truly am. No one else's apprehensions, opinions, thoughts, attitudes. No one else's anything. Just mine.

I had not realized how easily I shed other people when I make the short walk from my back porch to my detached garage. It's the only place that seems possible. It is like entering another world. One full of color, vibrancy, creation, life and only the color, vibrancy, creation and life I choose to let in.

It's also the place I feel most at home with God/Spirit, where I can be who really am and who I am there often includes many inner children, not tended anywhere else. It is where I am truly fed.

It was sad to realize I don't get that in my faith community because there's always some obligation, one more person to see, one more thing to do. I do get fed there, but not as unconditionally as I do in my studio. Probably because that's where my direct connection to God is best nurtured. I have had those kinds of experiences in worship, but then I leave my sea of contemplation for the land of real people. People for whom I really care and, therein may lie the catch. I need down time to nurture myself. As a nurturer, I love that work, but I also can't starve myself. I stupidly try at times and get to experience the results. Usually not favorably.

I am always a different person, a better person, when I emerge from any time in my studio. Thank God I have a place like that!

• How do I nurture myself? • Do I do it regularly? • Is there somewhere I can totally escape? • If not, how can I make that happen? • When I don't, what are the consequences?


I pull the kitchen door shut
and it closes out so much.
My mind is focused on
opening the porch door,traversing the stone
steps across the lawn,
while balancing a teapot,
cup and too many other things.
I am forced to put down
whatever is in my hands
to open the catproof latch
at the bottom
of the garage door.
Pick up my things,
close that door.
Set my things down
again to turn on the lights
located outside my studio,
open the screen door,
secure it with my favorite
mini boulder from Vermont,
then turn the handle on
the purple wooden door,
which is hinged in
the opposite direction.
Regather my things and
FINALLY enter my space.
My heart always sings
when I get inside and
shut the world away
... at least for awhile.
The short, but complicated
journey from back door
to studio has become a
relished meditation that
readies me to remember
who I really am.