Housecleaning - real and mental

No photos today, I'm afraid, so you'll have to take my word for it when I tell you it was a beautiful sunny Sunday yesterday. The temperature was up to 25 degrees and I made sure to change into a swimsuit and toast myself for 15 minutes on each side out on my deck! Sunshine is so good for the mood and the immune system.

My husband was out in the garden in a pair of shorts, sowing seeds and transplanting seedlings. He mowed the grass for the first time this year. The kids were outside kicking a ball around. We went for a bike ride around the neighbourhood (R and I had to dust the cobwebs off our bikes - we haven't used them for a while.) I did some weight training. I baked bread. I did four loads of laundry and dried them on the clothesline. Aaah, the pleasure of collapsing into bed at the end of a pleasantly busy day and putting my head on a pillowcase smelling fresh from being dried outside.

We turned on the irrigation for the first time too, and the boys put on their swimshorts so they could get wet and cool off.

The evening was a time for tea and reading the last of The Sorceror: Fort at River's Bend, the penultimate book in the Skystone series by Jack Whyte.

On Saturday, when I brought home all the groceries, I decided it was time to clean the fridge, so everything came out, food, shelves and all. I washed it all down and put everything back and it looked so neat and clean. I also realised it was time to go through my plastics cupboard - it was getting to the stage that opening the door might result in stuff falling out. So I took everything out of there, matched up containers and lids, recycled a bunch of soy yogurt pots, and now that cupboard is neat too.

Funny how, when one part of my life is in chaos, I feel the need to control another part. My fridge is clean, my plastic containers are lined up, today I'm vacuuming and cleaning the bathrooms, and I wish it was just as easy to do the same inside my head.

Unfortunately, the last week has been a virtual rollercoaster - actually that's not a good analogy, a rollercoaster implies ups as well as downs. I think a better analogy would be "it's going down the toilet". If I were to compare my perception of my current relationships with three particular friends to three earthenware pots, I would say that two are cracked and the third is smashed into little pieces on the floor.

The magic of synchronicity led to my husband finding an appropriate book on the library shelves on Saturday. It's called How to Heal Toxic Thoughts and I've started reading it and completed one of the meditations this morning.