A Sanctuary

I decided on a sign to go above my barn room door, and it is this one below: Sanctuary.

I thought about all the things the barn has always been to me, the place I've felt God's grace or all things coming together, inside me, that are good in the universe. Not just good, but true, because everything hasn't been good, in the sense that there has been loss, fear, and death here, too. Everything is made right, or correct in me, here in this place, as close as I can be to my barn family. 

This room is somewhat unplugged, but I am sitting in it right now typing this blog post. It's very peaceful.

This is what greets me when I walk out to the barn room. Epona is always leading the charge with mama close behind.

And, of course, Mr. Tweed. The snow is melting on their backs today, even though it still 20 degrees. They produce a lot of heat by eating 24/7 round bales. After the last week of below zero temps, 20 degrees seems balmy.

My husband finished the sink project. I love it. I'm glad I did look at all those other ideas, the ones I shared on this blog, because they probably did lead us to doing something ourselves. So glad we didn't buy something pre-made because this has so much more heart knowing it was made by my husband's hands.

The sink is cast iron, and a good size for filling buckets. 

I did mention that this is Tuffy's room, right? Well, here's my handsome greeter. He photo bombs all my photos nowadays.

I had to get a selfie with him yesterday. Some people have parrots on their shoulders, I have Tuffy.

Some of the little details, like coat hooks.

One of Cowboy's old blankets as an area rug. I'm going to dig out some more of his old blankets to use in front of the sink.

A photo looking out the large, round window, into the barn.

There's not a lot more to do. I contacted the photographer who captured the photos with Cowboy and me, and I asked her for the originals again. She offered to have a canvas made and color match it for me. It will be here next week. She's a friend of the family, so it will be good to see her again when she delivers it.

Also, my daughter-in-law is painting me a portrait of Cowboy in the snow. I'm looking very forward to that, too. 

My husband has started the outside planter boxes--more on that soon.

Not much more for me to do other than just enjoy the sanctuary, Tuffy, company of loved ones, and the joy of visiting our horses in the snow.

 

Sanctum: A Sacred Place Where One Is Free From Intrusions

 

Since we started the barn project, I hadn't had an opportunity to sit and enjoy the new space. It is still a bit under construction, and lacked any personal details to make me feel at home. 

Yesterday, the coffee table arrived. It has its own story, so I will sidetrack for just a moment. I found a coffee table like this one at a shabby chic hotspot in our town, but they wanted $320, and it had quite a few scratches. The owner offered to take it down to $289, but that still seemed too expensive for a scratched up table. My husband and I spent the day looking elsewhere, but came up empty. So, I referred to a photo of the tag on the table, and it had listed the manufacturer. 

A simple Google search fount the table online for $171, brand new, and free, fast shipping. It arrived yesterday, and I put it together, quite easily, in a few minutes. It has a solid wood top, wrought iron legs, and is heavy and sturdy. 

After I put it together, I returned to the house to retrieve the two personal items I knew I wanted to add to the room: the poem I wrote about yesterday, One Art, by Elizabeth Bishop...

and the drawing my granddaughter made for me as a Christmas present this year.

When my granddaughter's photo was placed on the mantle, I sank down into the loveseat, overwhelmed with emotion for that space. It struck me that I was in the inner sanctum of the great beautiful being of the spiritual known.

I say known, because the barn is where I have known the creator most truly. It is where Tuffy was born, 13 years ago. It is where Epona was born, and then returned from the vet, tired and alone, and lay in my lap as I stroked her body, her legs down to her little hooves, and cried. Yes, that exact spot is where we embraced her little life, or what was left of it. Cowboy's last months were spent here, too, just beyond that wall where the armoire stands.  All the memories returned to me at once and this thought:

We built a room in another's house. 

As I sat there, with Tuffy in my lap, a random song played, and it captured everything I was feeling--all the loss, heartache, wonder, fear, grace, gratitude, desperation, hope, happiness--all of it in one song. 

It was Belle, played by Gautier Capucon. 

Beautiful.

Yes, 

despite, 

even because of it all--

all--

it is beautiful.

The Art of Losing

 

Last summer I was on a walk with my daughter, and we were processing her great loss, the loss of her person, the one she still loved. I can't say that I lost a person in the same way she did--still so deeply in love with them. Those are not the kind of relationships you usually see come to an abrupt, and I do mean abrupt, end. We were all in shock, because no one saw it coming. It will take a lifetime to process for us, many more lifetimes for her.

But I was trying to cheer her up, (I'm not good at cheering up, that's for damn sure) and I remembered an old villanelle from my Modern Poetry days, called One Art. My memory was bad, and I thought it was called, The Art of Losing, but it's One Art, by Elizabeth Bishop. (Would that poem cheer you up? I don't think it did her either.)

I started to recite the bits and pieces I remembered, going on and on about losing this and that, and something about a disaster.  It didn't so much speak to my daughter, but it was yelling, quite loudly, to me. Later, I looked it up, read it over and over, tried to memorize it.

More months passed, and I forgot about the poem. But then, a few days ago, remembered it again, on another walk, with my husband, trying to recite One Art, still messing it up, still renaming it The Art of Losing. 

So, yeah, I made a decision to have that depressing little poem framed and hang it in my new room in the barn. It was the first personal item I decided upon, and it was decided from my heart, not my brain, but now, from this vantage, I see it is the theme since we broke ground on the barn. The perfect first item. Why? Because it's true, and it is begging to be acknowledged, even accepted.

That is where I am at with the barn project: What do I bring into this sacred (yes, the barn is sacred to me) space to express this point in my life?

Updates On the Barn Project

The structure of the barn project is finished, but the finishing touches are still in the works. The stain we used was an opaque one called "Bay Blue" from Lowes. It came the closest to what I was looking for, and it has a great deal of variation, depending on the light. I appreciate that complexity in the color. It's fun. Almost like a different room every time you walk in. 

Here it is with moderate light on a cloudy afternoon. (Today)

I'm sharing a wider view below because to the left of the photo, against, the wall, there will be an electric fireplace with white mantle. In the center of the chairs, there will be a round, wooden coffee table with wrought iron legs. Both are on the way.

The next photo was taken yesterday, at a different time of day, and you can see the color changing.

Here it is another day, before I moved the loveseat. You can also see the large round window that looks into the barn. It's really hard to capture the entire room from any one perspective, but this is pretty close.

Here it is on yet another day, and you can see the view of breezeway and stalls.

Look at how blue it was this day.

 grandson photo bomb.

The fun leaded glass windows we found.

The sink cabinet was really throwing me off, and I wrote a post about it. There were so many possibilities. However, as I looked at the rustic metal roofing we used, taken from an old barn in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, and saw the leftover pieces we had, it struck me that we should build our own and use that metal. The sink will be placed on the wall below where the plumbing is coming out of the wall.

I drew up some plans for my husband. Haha! Poor guy. But he got the picture enough to accompany me to Home Depot and help me buy the parts necessary for him to make it come to life.

Obviously, I am not an engineer or an architect.

Here's where it's at so far.

The top is a butcher block style counter top they sell at Home Depot, and is acacia wood. We're going to sand it down and stain it some version of the mixed redwood/walnut, then seal it. My husband is going to cut a portion out for the sink on the right. He's also going to cut off 3" on each side to give it an equal lip all the way around. 

Here are some of the parts that will be installed when it's done. A white, cast iron sink by Kohler, a black, wrought iron look faucet, also by Kohler, and a small hot water tank.

The cat modeling my old table is Tuffy. He was born in the barn almost 13 years ago, and he is loving the new room. My husband built him his own door to go in and out, but he prefers to stay in. Unfortunately, he isn't one to use the kitty litter box much. We will have to figure out how to train him better, if that's possible at his age.

Here's another photo of the cabinet, in an earlier stage. My husband used the leftover blue pine as the bottom shelf.

Here he is cutting the metal panels.

So, we are not ready for our final "reveal," but this gives you a good idea of where we're going. 

I have to admit, I will be very happy when my barn is no longer a construction project, but considering everything we've been through in the last few months, it is a miracle we've gotten this far. 

Speaking of miracles...I had my husband drive me back to my wishing fountain, aka the Rotary Fountain in Riverfront Park. 

It almost looks like a portal to the universe, doesn't it? 

Well, as we pulled up one evening, I looked around my car to see if there was anything we could leave there as a marker of the wish, and I found exactly two pennies in the center consul. Two shiny pennies, one for me, and one for my husband. We took turns going to the center and sending up a wish & a prayer.

Acceptance

Happy New Year, everyone. Welcome 2024. (So far, it hasn't been much different than 2023.)

I have been enjoying all of your blogs, but having a very hard time commenting on them since I updated the app on my phone. It absolutely does not allow me to comment from any of the phone browsers. Very strange since it does allow me to sign-in, but then it acts like I'm not signed in when I comment. I have to go to a computer somewhere in the house to do so at all. Please forgive the delay from reading your posts to commenting upon them. I will keep trying to figure it out. It keeps telling me to check my browser settings, but in every browser. 

(photo I took of the clock tower in downtown Spokane.)

Reading Aurora's post at Equine Expressions and Shirley's at Ride a Good Horse, the idea of a guiding word for 2024 came up. I liked both of theirs Release and Patience.

It got me thinking about my own word, and the one that resonated with me most, which is an awful lot like release, but not exactly the same, is Acceptance.

I had to make a hard decision yesterday, January 2nd. It was one that I have been considering and working through since about a year and a half ago or so, trying to find ways around it, or to change it, but nothing worked and the decision, or some decision, had to be made. That is all I will say for now, but it did lead me to that word--Acceptance.

I was talking to my mom about it this morning and how Truman and Oppenheimer had that famous conversation about the Atomic Bomb--Oppenheimer feeling guilty and responsible for developing it, but Truman telling him that it was his decision to drop it. The buck stops here.

It reminded my mom of what her mom, my grandmother, used to always tell her whenever she struggled with a decision--make your decision and live with it.

Make your decision and live with it. Hmmm. I tend to think about decisions, put them off, think some more about them, perhaps act, then wonder if it was the right decision forever. That is lead to an early death type of thinking.

Acceptance: make your decision and then live with it.

It's kind of like release, because you are releasing the worrying, ruminating, and stress and moving more toward a thoughtfulness and action approach.

If we did everything we could do, the best we knew how to do it at the time, knowing none of us have a crystal ball, or are perfect, but trying our very, very best at each juncture--what more is there to do?

The other side, of course, is what others do to us that's out of our control. I'm not sure which is harder to accept, but the same response is required. How do I react? What did I learn? How do I proceed now?

In 2023, and now the start of 2024, there was plenty for me to accept, and the universe does not seem ready, yet, to let me escape the hard choices.

----

(The fountain in downtown Spokane. Stand in the center and make a wish!)

I am a big fan of New Year's Resolutions. My brother and I started a family tradition 25 years ago of putting them in a box on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, then reading them the next year.  We used to even have a family trophy which was passed off to the winner each year. It brings laughs, love, tears, and lots of applause when they are read out loud and we celebrate each other's accomplishments. 

One year, my husband wrote: Love Linda like she's never been loved before, and he has never lived that one down. The next year, when they asked me if he'd accomplished it, (this was many years ago when we were basically still newlyweds) I said absolutely yes! They all laughed and clapped and then teased him mercilessly every year to follow. The reason that one stands out it is because my sister gave us all a video of that Christmas and New Years Eve this year as a Christmas present and that whole scene was recorded on it--the mushy love note, the hilarious jokes that followed--all there. It was sweet and had us in tears.

This year's resolutions were well met by us--one of them having been, FINALLY finishing our barn! Woot! Woot! (Photos coming soon)

For 2024 I put in walk/hike 100 days and work with my horses 100 days. Seems simple to accomplish, but when you have so many responsibilities pulling you this and that way, it becomes tough to follow through. We have two trips planned to Sedona and one to Houston, so I do see a lot of hiking in my future. And, the weather couldn't be better for getting that 100 days in with the horses. I have a granddaughter horse camp scheduled here for March. Yay!

One last thought: there is so much that is out of our control in life, and so many hard decisions to make, also somewhat out of our control--it can overwhelm. But it also creates that much more need and desperate necessity to enjoy the beautiful bits and pieces of our lives.

Happy New Year, friends.