Feng Shui - Moving 27 things

Perhaps some of you have noticed, perhaps not, but during the past three weeks or more, I've posted Thursday poems and Sunday Scribblings and not much more here. I've continued to make a daily 48-word post on my 48x365 blog and occasionally uploaded one of my SoulCollage cards with a few words about it on my SoulFragments blog. I've managed to keep up-to-date with blog reading, and even posted comments here and there, but I haven't really felt present a lot of the time in blogland. I've been making hurried visits, guiltily stealing time from other responsibilities - and at the same time, telling myself that this minimal activity here was important to me - important to my self-care, and indeed it was and is. During those few weeks, I managed to eat well, get to the gym to keep to my 3-times-a-week goal, get adequate sleep, and complete my thesis for my B.Sc in psychology. I handed it in last Friday. I'm free!!! It's done. And I feel like blowing my trumpet a bit by saying how proud I am of myself for taking care of myself while I was doing that.

But - something does have to give when a major proportion of one's energy is going into a big project, and when I posted on Sunday about my home, I must have painted a fairly rosy picture. I mentioned my kitchen is cheerful, but neglected to say the floor hadn't been washed in... oh... 3 weeks! - As for the windows! - The genista I'm so in love with would have a hard time being seen through the grime that had built up on those windows... Get the picture? This house needed a bit of TLC. - And it needed a bit of action to simply get the energy moving inside as well. A lot of stale study-energy was sitting around my home, and it needed to shift. So today, I got the mop and bucket out and washed that floor, and then cleaned the windows in kitchen and study (the front of the house will wait for another day), and it was when I came to moving and later replacing all the little items that have accumulated on my window-sills, I thought of that maxim in Feng-Shui - that if you need to shift energy, you should move twenty-seven things.

Are there 27 things on my kitchen window-sill? Let's see...

1. The jade plant which is a descendent of the very jade plant I bought to decorate my very first home away from home - 27 years ago. This particular one is at least 12 years old. Struggling a bit, sitting on a north-facing window-sill. Needs repotting and some individual TLC. Noted.
2. A mis-shapen tiny cactus that looks like a hand with 27 fingers of its own. Unremarkable, until each finger sprouts a tiny orange flower. Love it. But I can never predict when to expect a flower. Maybe soon?
3. Four stones - one little marble stone, with pinkish veins in it
4. one black, grey, white, mottled, flat smooth, the size of the palm of my hand, beautiful to hold
5. one pale grey, also flat, shaped like a piece of bread
6. and one white stone, the shape of a heart, picked up on Maghery Beach facing west towards New York, just days after 9/11. I took it as a talisman, a token, a memorial.
7. A little flat saucer brought by a friend as a gift from Israel - painted in a blue and maroon pattern, and sitting on the saucer...
8. A tiny green china frog, a gift from my sister's college room-mate on a visit to my first home-away-from-home way back in 1980.
9. A tiny ginger-and -white striped cat, gift from my sister on the same visit.
10. Miniscule pink plastic elephant. Came from a Christmas cracker. Seemed to belong in the saucer "menagerie".
11. An exceedingly ugly and kitsch china duck which my son gave me so proudly as a Christmas gift when he was about 11. For a week before the event, he was telling me "You're just going to LOVE your present! I know you are!" Of course, I do.
12. Around the duck's neck (it needed some decoration) a bangle of tiger-eye stones
13. and a bangle of some blue stones I cannot name off-hand
14. and a bangle of safety-pins and little beads. Sounds awful, and looks very pretty.
15. and a string with a tiny bottle of bubbles with a smiley face on the bottle.
16. A big bottle of bubbles, so that I can pick it up, step out the back-door and bless the neighbourhood with bubbles whenever I feel it needs it (or I do!)
17. A painted wine-glass in lovely swirls of wine, yellow, blue, gold. Beautiful with a tea-light lighting inside.
18. A black oil-burner with a deep well.
19. A cinnamon-scented candle, gift from one of the women in the first ever writing class I facilitated.
20. A pair of little green glass bottles with butterflies on them.
21. A grey and blue pottery bud-vase, gift chosen and bought by my then-6-year-old neice for my wedding. She's getting married in September!
22. A blue-and-white jug with a pattern of cornflowers, just right for any posy of flowers or few stems I bring in from the garden.
23. A tiny phial of pebbles and shells with a pebble stopper, sent from Chile by a young friend who has been studying there. She knows I have a fondness for the poetry of Pablo Neruda, and when she visited his home at Isla Negra, she got this little keepsake of his beach to send back to me. I treasure it.
24. A brown pottery dish with shells and pebbles gathered on holidays - Lanzarote and Scotland being the most recent additions, but somewhere in there are shells from Spain and parts of Ireland too.
25. A violet/lilac/purple glass beaded tealight holder
26. A small candle in a brown/gold shot-glass
27. A red glass outdoor candle.

And that doesn't count the butterflies and crystals that hang on the window either!

Oh... and I didn't just move them and put them back. Everything went back in a different place. It looks like a whole new range of items. The energy has shifted!

I'm back!!!!!