Home as Body as Soul

If you prefer to listen, rather than read:

There's a space in my home I'd stopped seeing.

That happens, doesn't it? The places we pass through every day become invisible. We stop arriving in them. We just move through.

It's a small space that serves as a mudroom - the threshold between the garage and the rest of our home. Not glamorous. Not the space anyone would photograph for a mood board. But it's the last thing we touch when we leave and the first thing that receives us when we come home.

I'd been walking past it for nine years.

Liminal spaces hold what we haven't noticed

I'm doing a 23-day practice right now with Jacqueline Gates called Glamour Magic Living, and she invited us to tend our liminal spaces - the thresholds, the in-betweens, the places of transition in our homes.

I knew immediately which space was mine.

What I found when I actually looked was nine years of half-attention. A rug that needed air. A bench with a drawer full of things that no longer belonged. Decorations chosen by a version of me who wasn't thinking about intention - just filling space.

It wasn't neglect, exactly. It was invisibility.

The tending was the practice

I pulled everything out. The rug was vacuumed, then went outside into the sun for the entire day. The cushions went into the dryer. The baseboards were cleaned. The drawers got cleared. The decorations came down one by one, and only what matched the intention I was setting went back up.

That intention: this space should feel like our home opening its arms to us every time we return, and wrapping us in love and stability every time we leave.

I held that in my body while I worked. The love I have for this space. For the people who live here, and for those who visit. For the life we've built inside these walls. I let that move through my hands as I cleaned.

Grapefruit and cypress in the diffuser - lightness and stability. Soon, a coffee candle that makes the whole threshold smell like coming home.

It took a few hours. It changed something I can't fully name yet.

The home knows

Here's what I've come to believe: our homes feel what we bring to them. Not in a woo way that requires any particular belief system - just in the plain, observable way that a tended space feels different than a neglected one. Not just to the eye. To the body.

When I walk through that threshold now, I feel it.

The space has been seen. And something in me has been seen along with it.

What this has to do with you

Re-emergence isn't always dramatic. It doesn't always look like a breakthrough or a revelation.

Sometimes it looks like pulling a rug outside and letting Mama do something to it through the sun and fresh air.

Sometimes it looks like only putting back what supports a new intention.

➡️ Is there a threshold in your life - a liminal space, a place of transition, a thing you've been passing through without seeing - that's waiting for your attention?

You don't have to overhaul it. You just have to look.

Want to go deeper into what's stirring in you right now? The Apothecary is open. Start there.