You know how it is, you see something on social media and it looks so perfect. It looks so cozy, like the perfect life. Well one day I saw this woman post a picture of a fireplace and two windows that she had taken from her bed on a rainy day. Immediately, like ya do, I thought, "Wouldn't it be grand to have a view like that and a fire and to lay down and read in bed?" It is easy to see the beauty in others lives. It is curated for us. We are given it in moments, when the light is pure and the mood is right.
Well I live in a nearly two hundred year old farm house with slanted ceilings. There is parts of my room I cannot stand up straight in. There is never going to be two large windows and a fireplace. I thought, well, you are not going to have that. So much of what we see in magazines, on social, and on HGTV we are not going to have.
The key though is being able to see what you do have.
Somehow that little post brought me to my own fire. I do have a stove that heats the back end of my house. There are windows in that room too. Essentially, I have what I thought was beyond my reach. There is even a couch in that room. It does not look the same but it looks the way I like things to look.
My home is an art project. I am always refining it, making it cozy. I love my home the way it is. It is the way it is because for years I have been making it that way. It is just part of living for me. It does not mean buying things for it all the time. Though I do buy beautiful handmade things for it sometimes because it is a handmade house. Yesterday I bought some silk screened pillows from Dartmouth artist Marilyn Smulders. Mostly it is about moving things around, displaying things in just the right way, bringing in some nature.
It is about loving what is already there.
So when I stopped aspiring over that instagram post and looked at what I already had, I saw my fire and the couch and realized it was there waiting for me to read in the dark mornings.
Looking into our own lives for what we already love is a key to living well.
Lately I have taken to turning up the fire on the dark mornings when I wake early and bringing down a light wool blanket and cozying up on the couch with a faux shearling pillow and reading until the teal light begins to rise from the dark of the evergreen trees out the windows. I watch the fire and I read my library book with a tiny book light and I am thankful for this.
As the light began to rise this morning I wondered what I might hook today as I am making small rugs and each day or two requires a new idea. Still lost in my book, the fire and the comfort of the early morning dark, I decided to wait til I was at the frame and see what comes. It will come and I'll be there to meet it.
And I will be here to meet my life and what it offers.
