“How to be happy when
you are miserable. Plant Japanese
poppies with cornflowers and mignonette, and bed out the petunias among the
sweet-peas so that they shall scent each other. See the sweet-peas coming up.
Drink very good tea
out of a thin Worcester cup of a color between apricot and pink… ~Rumer Godden
It is hard to believe that it has been one year since I
moved in to my house… one that I bought after so much struggle and loss totally
by myself and have been slowly decorating (ever so slowly) as finances and
cancer treatments allow. I am finally decorating
my home totally for myself… not for mother or father, husband or children, but
just for me and coming home, not only to the beautiful location I have but to
an interior that fills me with so much peace has been a revelation into my own
psyche and a complete joy.
Rumer Godden, in her memoirs A House with Four Rooms,
stated “It was the small things that helped, taken one by one and savored. Make
yourself savor them,” she told herself when life was not tidy.
Well, life is not tidy around here today. My schedules are colliding, needs are
conflicting, my oldest shepherd has a swollen mammary gland and needs to see
the vet, nausea from the last infusion is weighing heavy, and my office is
strewn with real-life refuse, reflecting outwardly the disarray of my own mind
at this moment.
One of the reasons I personally love Rumer Godden’s writing
as much as I do is that she weaves the colorful threads of her extraordinary
life –domestic, creative, and spiritual—with such ease. The seams that hold her life together do no
pull or gape the way mine do more often than I care to admit. She began her career in 1936 and in a sixty
year period wrote 57 books. She wrote
novels for both children and adults, non-fiction, short story collections and,
of course my favorite – poetry. Most of her novels, which are mystical,
celebrate the beauty of real life; the magic, the mystery and the mundane. The New York Times hailed her as a writer who
“belongs in that small exclusive club of women, which includes Isak Dinesen and
Beryl Markham, who could do pretty much anything they set their minds to;
hunting tigers, alluring men, throwing elegant dinner parties, and winning
literary fame.” Of all of her books,
however, it is her memoirs that I read over and over again. I am captivated by
how she lived, nurtured a family and created many homes out of shells of houses
all over the world while writing almost continuously (and people think I don’t
sleep?) She is such a glorious story
teller, but no story is as riveting as real life.
The soul craft of creating and sustaining safe havens set
apart from the world, in which to seek and savor small authentic joys, is a
recurring theme in Rumer’s work. Her
secret in living such an authentic life seems, to me, to have been in dwelling,
no matter where she actually kept house in the heart of Spirit…
There is an Indian proverb that says that everyone is a house
with four rooms; a physical room, a mental room, an emotional room, and a
spiritual room. Most of us tend to live
in one room most of the time, but unless we go into every room every day, even
if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person…
My new life (however long God will allow it to be) in my
new home, in the part of the country I love, is showing me how beautiful EVERY
room is…and I let the mountain’s breeze blow through them all each day as the
sun comes shining through every window.
I have not planted sweet-peas or Japanese poppies, but I
have planted a Prickly Pear Tree, a Fire Stick, a Candle Stick and next weekend
will be adding colorful bougainvillea to gaze at during the day as I play with
my two shepherds.
As I sit here in my office, sipping a cup of French Roast
Coffee with a touch of cream and cinnamon out of my favorite coffee cup, it’s
nice, for the first time in my life, to feel like I am complete; I am at peace.
