If you want motivation to throw things away, just rent a $90 dumpster from the city and let it sit out in front of your house for a week. I’ve spent the last week or so weeding, whittling and winding down the drawers, closets and corners of my house.

In eight years one can accumulate a lot of junk.

We have a pile for good will, a pile for friends-who-need ________ and a pile that my father or my husband haulsl out to the front to toss in the dumpster. Garbage. Rubbish. Trash. Land fill material.

I’m noticing that every board game eventually loses a vital piece, every puzzle becomes incomplete and every toy set that once came shiny and firmly secured into its impossible box wanders strewn throughout multiple containers around the house. Or behind the piano. The order-to-chaos rule reigns lately and eventually most everything we have becomes something we no longer need.

So we give away or throw away or put away it all in storage. But there’s one thing I haven’t told you. I have trouble throwing things out. I tightly grip my belongings, my skinny clothes and my one-piece-missing puzzle set. And my old bikini I’ll never wear again. You are thanking me now.

I don’t think I’m quite pre-hoarder level yet, but I just don’t want to let things go.

But what if I find the missing corner piece?

I might lose enough weight to fit into my pre-Hope jeans.

Surely I will need that in the future and I do NOT want to have to buy it again.

The bikini? Maybe. On a private beach. On a private island. On a private earth…

Throwing things away lately has been teaching me to hold onto things loosely. Like jeans that I can only fit over my knee. Like stained baby clothes that elicit baby-love and sighs all over again.

And like homes. Like living rooms where friends have laughed. And like bedrooms where I’ve kissed baby cheeks and patted baby backs. I’m learning to hold with loose grip to things like back yards where children’s pools are blown up and deflated each summer.  And to things like kitchen sinks where I’ve washed thousands of dishes and had conversations with friends while I work.  I’m holding loosely the room that is often filled with my husband’s voice and guitar as he plays.

My fingers have relaxed and I hold them quietly in my lap. Loose grip.

Because these things, these old clothes or houses we’ve made into homes are not eternal. But we often create eternal qualities around them and tell ourselves that we CANnot and WILL not throw things out or let things go.

Those baby cheeks and friends and children will go with me. This husband will go with me. They are the eternal. I’m not leaving the love or the joy or even the tears behind. Just the shell they were housed in.

On losing a home? It isn’t so bad if I’m learning how to hold it with a loose hand rather than scratch and grip until my strength fails and I can’t hold it any longer.

When I hold something so tightly I’m worried about who I will be or what identity I might lose without that thing. I’m worried that the love and laughter and baby sighs will go with it.

Without that house I am scared that somehow I won’t be ME anymore.

But these things and physical pieces that surround me do NOT define me. Neither does a purse or a car or the right shoes.

Or even a home.

Do you have trouble throwing things away? Do you hold things loosely? Do you, like me, have a tendency to grip things tightly until the very end? Do you have a box of clothes you will NEVER fit into again?

I wasn’t here when Naomi ate the penny.

Or when she bloodied her chin on the driveway yesterday.

I wasn’t here this weekend when the girls went to sleep and they asked for me, or when they felt my absence in the mornings before school. I wasn’t here to check on them late at night and kiss foreheads one last time.

But I am now.

I am here to hear the giggles and laughter of tickles on the living room sofa. I am here to see a seven-year-old jump up and down in her riding outfit when I met her at her lessons straight from the airport. I am here to brush wet hair after baths.

I am home now. And this is where I belong.

For most of my life I’ve been grounded.

If I have to choose a word, like my word, the first thing that drips out of my mind is SOLID.

It isn’t as if I am perfectly stable. Not at all. I have wonderfully unstable hours and weeks and years. But I am usually always the one who’s being doing [whatever] for the longest…attended my church the longest, had the same cell phone number for 8 years, the same email address, the same house, lived for my whole life within 20 miles of where I was born.

I’m here. I’m solid. I’m grounded. You know where to find me.

And its likely that http://www.sarahmarkley.com/ will always house some itteration of my blog or a website directing toward me or something.

Some times in my life I’ve view this solidity as a liability. As if my feet, instead of being firmly planted on the earth, were being swallowed up in a swampy mess of mud and concrete. There have been times where I’ve hated my own spot in the world and viewed it as being “stuck” rather than “secure”. How desperately I’ve wanted to extract my feet from the bog and jump. Just jump. To anywhere but here.

Because, now, instead of feeling stuck, I see my groundedness as an asset rather than a liability. I love it that my address has been the same for 6 years. I love it that so many different people have walked through my front door and that if they really needed me, they know where to find me. It is an asset that I can tuck my girls into their beds at night, in their same beds in the same spot in the world as last night.

Instead of stuck in a muddy swamp, my feet are planted in the patchy grass of my backyard, with six-year-old (and older) roots extending as far as I allow them to. And it feels good to be home.

You know where you can find me.

What’s your word?

I have been reading. I have. Its just, like I knew it would be, difficult in the midst of all that I do in mothering and wiving(?). I have been reading Anna Karenina, but not as often as I should be. I have been doing a helicopter-hover in a few chapters lately (after a great beginning before school started) and I’m okay with it.

I am on page 356 of 808. Not bad for about 6 weeks, in my opinion, considering all the other things I have accomplished in the past month and a half.

In school and in teaching, I couldn’t read without a pen in my hand. All of the countless words I’ve underlined and passages I have starred, notes I’ve made in margins – all of these could make up their own set of books. But in reading Anna, I’ve set the pen down. Understand that there a probably hundreds of underline-worthy passages, but this masterpiece, I am reading for pleasure. I’m not taking a test on it, I’m not writing a paper or thesis, and I am surely not going to be teaching it to anyone. So, down goes the pen. And in go the words, the beauty, and the magnificent prose without an underline.

Except for one. I’ve only underlined one part of one sentence.

In the beginning of the book when a despondent Levin travels home to his country house from Moscow (after propsosing to Kitty and then being refused), Tolstoy describes Levin’s happiness at being away from the city. Levin was “…at home, and at home the very walls are a great help” (184).

For whatever reason, this fragment, this portion of a thought – it resounds with me. Possibly it is due to my stage of life: the love I have for my girls and my attempt at making their HOME a safe and comfortable place. Perhaps its just how I feel – home is the best place, a sanctuary from the entire world, a place that I can somewhat control and keep things in order. My walls, these walls, as scuffed and stained as they might be at times, these walls are always a great help to me. I really love being home.

Denise posted yesterday about sacredness in mothering, sacred moments we have at home. Holy moments.

This has me thinking more than most posts I read. So, Denise, this is my answer to your question.

Miracles are here, everyday. Sacred, practical, normal miracles. When I create a sanctuary in my home for my family, there is sacredness here.

I came across a quotation by Willa Cather: “The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always. ” (from Death Comes for the Archbishop). Maybe miracles are not “miraculous”, but perhaps just a more intentional view of what we are in the midst of; the concentrated seeing of my own family and life (or to overuse a cliche: to see what is in my own backyard).

When I open my eyes to see past the fly that keeps buzzing around the dining room, and look over the pile of unfolded laundry (we all have these – mine just happens to be a clean pile), and beyond the disorganized toy room…this is when I see the miracles. The sacred in my own home.

The small giggle from the living room. The soft, squishy baby foot that rests on my leg. The tired eyes after a long day of so much fun. The sweet conversations between a 5 year old and her baby sister…the longing in her I see for her sister to look up to her. The wide eyes of a toddler seeing something and naming it with her new words for the first time. A kiss goodbye on the palm of my hand…

Everything, it all is sacred. My husband saying to me words I barely hear because I am busy making lunches…but I should stop, stare at him, and take in his words. This is a sacred moment.

The job of being a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife – these are sacred. Sacred means holy or consecrated. Because of Who I belong to, and the deepness of my daily job (raising PEOPLE), possibly all of what I do is sacred.