Personally Speaking

When I bought my ideal Caribbean cottage seven years ago, it was an extremely busy time. In addition to moving, I was still dealing with the financial, administrative, and emotional fallout of dismantling and rebuilding my life, trying to train a menace of a dog, seeking medical help for my teenage daughter as more diagnoses unfolded, and just generally trying to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes I’m amazed by the fact that I managed to put together a home that I love, especially as I have very little memory of doing any of it. So maybe it’s no surprise that I only recently looked around and discovered that, even in the fog of calamity, my reality (my personality, my struggles, and my dreams) was being expressed in my choices of the items with which I chose to surround myself.

It seems my personal totems fall into three categories:

Birds. One day I realized that my sanctuary is teeming with bird imagery. There’s the little trio of bird statues, rescued from my former life, on the console inside my front door. The wooden sandpiper that’s a souvenir of a beach trip taken pre-motherhood. The intricately carved and painted goldfinch that my children brought me from a National Park. The primitive cast iron robin gathered on one of many trips through vintage and antique stores (looking for something to fill the hole I wasn’t fully aware of?) There’s a Spanish mosaic of a little bird on a branch in my living room and a large painting of a heron on my dining room wall.  

The ledge above my writing desk in the Creatorium hosts two tiny ones: a simple orange ceramic I picked up visiting a friend in her artsy village, and a bluebird of happiness sent to me by the same friend. Then there’s the new painting I chose for over the couch, “The Talker” (attracted by the visual but sold by the title, perfect for someone finding their voice at the eleventh hour), who has a bird perched on her hand.

In my bedroom there’s a copy of the precocious painting of a heron done by the CWP when she was in kindergarten. The ceramic cardinal stake that reminds me of my dad (I was visited by an inordinate number of cardinals in the months after his death). And if you look closely, you will see birds accompanying the goddess in one of the first prints I bought as I was starting over.

It’s not like I had a lifelong fascination with birds. In fact, if you’d asked me, they wouldn’t have even made the top twenty-five list of my interests. I think my subconscious was exerting a strong pull when I was curating all of this imagery. Because, while admittedly a bit trite, what could be more on brand for the woman who recovered her song when she flew to freedom; the woman who is reveling in the beauty and joy of life beyond the cage in which she helped to imprison herself?

Hearts. The hearts scattered throughout my house are all post-divorce acquisitions. (I know, I’m an analyst’s dream.) The canvas of modernist multi-colored hearts in the guest bath. The heart ornaments in my bedroom. The oversize heart necklace of semi-precious stones that I gifted myself on my first birthday of freedom. The therapeutic collage centered around a broken heart that I’ve posted in the Creatorium. The gold Sacred Heart, picked up in France, that welcomes me to my kitchen. Various hearts I’ve decoupaged with “choose love” or David Lynch’s “fix your hearts or die”.

I feel like the gathering of hearts has been more conscious than the accumulation of birds. Almost like once I’d fought for and gained my freedom I could move on to a higher plane. To learning to love myself so that I could extend that love to others; to softening my heart; to striving to always choose love. Or maybe I’m just drawn to the shape, who knows? Best not to take oneself too seriously.

Words. I looked around recently and realized just how much of my décor, whether rescued from the “marital home” or more recently acquired, contained words. Nothing as saccharine as “live, love, laugh”, but lots of words, nonetheless. There’s “Believe There is Good in the World” given to me long ago by a dear friend I miss terribly. There’s “Be the Reason Someone Smiles Today” which I got to redirect my daughter and myself when we first arrived in our new home. In my bedroom there’s Winston Churchill’s “Never, Never, Never Give Up”, purchased long ago in my darkest days. There’s also “Begin Each Day with a Grateful Heart” on the wall across from my bed, which I actually do now. There’s a decorative obelisk in my front garden that includes the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love”. And there’s my current favorite: my most recent purchase for the Creatorium, a large canvas, with some of its’ letters reversed, that reads “Different is a Better Story”.

This one is, of course, no mystery. I’ve been obsessed with words forever. I will always be fascinated by their beauty and power and by the endless possibilities they present.

For so many years, I was in survival mode, doing what I thought I needed to do to be loved. I hadn’t an inkling who I was, never mind who I wanted to be. I’m beyond thrilled to now be able to say, “this is who I am; this is what I love”.

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Thanks for reading. Do you have a personal totem? A spirit animal? What would I notice if I looked around your space?

And a totally unrelated book recommendation: The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, by Amanda Montell. A very engaging look at the various cognitive biases, which in some cases are turbo-boosted in our age of information overload, that govern our beliefs and decision-making. Great food for thought.