My New Home, CO – Distilling a 3rd Space

I moved to Colorado last year.  These are my new (yellow) walls.  My office is in our beautiful basement.  I moved 10 months ago.  I spent 10 months setting up life for the collective.  This is how I am organized, and this is how I begin.  Its been a massive project, not done, but most/enough underway or settled, to feel into here.

This space combines 3 former physical spaces I used before the move:

i) My studio at Activ Space – coaching and earlier self devt/art/blogging.

ii) My backroom at my former house – the place I looked for jobs, listened to my daughter being cared for by her nanny as a baby, where I initiated focusing inward, manifesting changes, and pursing a different way.

iii) My small group work – which took place at the agency I volunteered bi-monthly in grief support and at the spiritual center where I led contemplative groups and came to be trained by a spiritual direction teacher in group facilitation.

iv) Also, really a 4th space – my PhD office where I had my materials, my research, my books, my ethnographic materials, my first attempt at a role of bringing my professional and personal gifts forward.

Five years ago, I said “I feel like Mma Ramotswe”.  Today I feel a younger sense of quiet and possibility that I haven’t felt in a long time. The feeling “no one is looking or listening.”  “There is space for me to be quietly creating”.

The last two months, I step into focusing my myself.  Its been hard.  Its been my work to build and manifest a deep floor.  Hold back my expansive side until there is simplicity inside and outside.  That work underway, I focus on ‘my infrastructure’.  Terrifying really, moving into my own and trusting the foundations.

I was shaky setting it up: sketching, engaging the store where I got the materials, the trips and liaising to get the order placed (correctly), finding an installer, navigating the workmanship, and calibrating if it is right.  Trust, analysis, organization, spatial analysis, diligence, and interpersonal management.  Infrastructure helps me make me the inside come out to begin to manifest new things.  I was shaky and vulnerable trying to create this these months.

I have a beautiful guest room for my hospitality next store.  My art closet across the way.  My family’s family room with lots of things for all of us to do is nearby, down the hallway.  No more driving.  No more rent.  No more landlord.  No more partial set up, to be torn down as an interim step.  Now, I have all of this in one place!  In my home.  It is beautiful to have my special bookcase alongside of my PhD diploma and my coaching certification. Quiet and connected place.