My House Is... Cute??
A moment of unexpected reassurance.
This will be a little tiny bit of a "woo" post - appropriately, I suppose, for the time of year.
I've been writing here about my animistic conviction that my house is, in some way, alive. And about how I've been trying to understand how it's feeling and what it needs from me (besides renovations, which, *stares at long and expensive to-do list*). But when I try to think about how the house feels, I usually end up focusing back on myself. I notice a feeling of my own that I've been projecting onto the house, and I get useful insight into myself, but not into the building.
The other day I felt something different.
It was a pretty small thing. I'd come home stressed out and in a rush. I was storming around, putting things away, mentally grumbling to myself, and all of a sudden I looked up at my office walls and got a feeling.
I was stressed out, but my house was like, =^_^=. It was just cute and happy and wanted me to succeed.
This isn't completely out of left field. My office walls are pink. I probably spend more time there than in any other room. It gets good sunlight during the day, and in the last couple of months I rearranged it and put in a much bigger, better, cooler looking desk. It's a relatively tidy, happy looking space and it also has evidence of my accomplishments on the walls. It's not completely counter-intuitive that someone could walk into my office and get a feeling of cuteness and happiness.
It just threw me for a second because I always assumed that, if I made mental contact with the house, it would be big and portentious. It would be all about my responsibilities to maintain the space and how I was or wasn't meeting them, or about even more big and fraught things, like emotional energies that were left in the house from previous tenants
But nope. What I got was just a short, cute, message of support.
I understood in a new way what Marie Kondo likes to say about homes and possessions - that they support you and they want you to succeed.
It was just for a second, and I don't know when anything like it will happen again. If you want to know whether it was "really" the house, or just some buried part of my mind, activated by the cute and happy surroundings, reminding me things were not that bad - I can cheerfully remain agnostic about this. But either way I think I'm slowly taking the house in a direction that works both for it and for me - and not everything in this realm is doom and portents. Sometimes, your house really does just want to tell you it likes you.
In other news:
Voting for the Rhysling Award, in the Long Form category, ends today! You can hear me read one of my nominated poems, “Dream Logic,” here on YouTube.
I’ll be reading my poem “Google Glasses” as part of The Sprawl magazine’s virtual launch party on Nov 5. You can register for the party here.
Thank you for writing about animistic concepts.
I have no conviction on the matter, but I have for a long time been considering the possibility that some places have their own spiritual existence with their own feelings and desires. Originally this was referring to nature places, such as rivers and mountains.
In my youth, at all too young age, I was an Annapurna trekker in the Himalayans. That didn’t work out as planned, but in retrospect I think that the mountains probably guided me into other things which I wasn’t looking for and which later provided for better balance.
Later, I have been thinking that maybe some man-made villages and towns, which are smaller than and part of present-day big cities, have their own spiritual existence with feelings and desires. This could be explained differently: When number of people gather in a particular place, their surplus life-energy might cross some threshold and form a spiritual existence, which then could, on the other hand, ask something from the people, but also give something to them. Before Covid-19, I was very much obsessed and in love with one world-famous, or notorious, village. This time the village and spirit guided me into new things I had never thought about before and which contributed for a better balance and improved opportunities.