Spring Cleaning
hope as mop and hoe
There is a secret place. A radiant sanctuary. As real as your own kitchen. More real than that… Overflowing with the ten thousand beautiful things. Worlds within worlds… This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter. Shatter the darkness that shrouds the doorway…Mirabai Starr translation of Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle
Sometimes you can’t avoid it. It’s time. To spring clean. To move furniture, to gasp at the gunk that’s found good breeding ground beneath
and get to work regardless of the season. Winters especially. Sweep up those dust bunnies, mop away the dregs, vanquish grime’s gridlock.
Sometimes you can’t avoid it. It’s time. To spring clean. To move bureaus, beds, and shelves within your interior castle, to gasp at the gunk that’s found good breeding ground and get to work regardless of the season. Winters particularly
prompt this. Prep the barrenness — weed root-deep environmentally-unfriendly, deadly beliefs, behaviors, and energy. Amend with hope.
Seed with insight. Mulch with trust.
Grow a conservatory
where grace notes and trills blossom into daffodils, ranunculi, and tulips in full sun streaming through walls of star-plated, spring-scented glass.
©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2021
A habit I inherited from my mother and affirmed by Feng Shui is to move furniture when my environment feels too dense, sluggish, dark, off. Ahhhh, the release once it’s done!
Something else is released as well, however. Dust bunnies! Fluffles of them. Or perhaps ‘warren’ is a better term since dust bunnies burrow beneath things.
Whatever. I was sweeping up dust bunnies and gunk like mad the other day when the Muse nudged. “Our interiors could use some spiritual release and cleansing, too, girlfriend.”
It’s always a Journey.
Thank you, Trisha Traughber and team at Vagabond Voices, for offering this poem a place to shelter.
And thank you, dearest readers, for keeping me company. You make the ‘housework’ that goes into poem-writing a joy.