Renovate: Part I

Our house and our life have been in a certain measure of chaos for some weeks now as we renovate our den/family room/TV room downstairs, which has involved completely gutting the room, raising the entrance hall ceiling, knocking down some walls to open the space up, laying new wood floor and stairs, and creating beautiful window seat storage. It’s wonderful! The chaos of house and life stems in part from the dust, noise and dirt of the renovations, but also from the furniture and trappings of the emptied den now piled high in other corners of the house that do not have the space to adequately contain them, as well as simply – I confess – from the fact that when my home is not working the way it normally does, I just can’t find the energy to pick it up!

Since this is the first real renovation we have done in any house (while living in it) I have long watched others in the boat we are now cast adrift in, and not understood the stress they experience. “They should be excited not stressed”, I have thought in my inexperience. “They know it won’t last forever, so why fret and fuss over temporary inconvenience?” But now I know how it feels from the inside, I get it... and we may never renovate again! (Until perhaps, like a woman who decides to have another child 18 months after a labour she loathed, we forget the ‘pain’ and skip blithely into another season of stress for the ‘aesthetic joy set before us’!) I am amazed – and this is a great learning curve for me – how life just does not work that well and doesn’t feel ‘quite right’ when the space we inhabit does not work and isn’t quite right. What creatures of place and habit we are – so desperately in need of beauty and order, space and light, rhythm and flow. And how the lack of these can curb energy and strangle spirits as surely as any more purely relational or emotional disturbance!

Now of course we were excited to begin this project, we still are excited to see it all fall into place, and I know we won’t regret the decision and will SO enjoy the results; but there has been many a moment when I have found myself wondering why we decided to do this, and if it is really worth it. It almost feels as if we have survived rather than fully lived the last two months, and I regret the lack of energy and creativity for things I care about, especially those carefully crafted moments of family connection and hospitality to friends, which are so enabled and enriched by the space in which they take place. I feel very keenly the tension between, on the one hand, wanting to improve and beautify these spaces in order, hopefully, to improve and beautify what can take place in them, and on the other hand missing out on what I most love and value because of the ‘improving process’. I also wonder how much I miss out on what could go on in my house because I am not yet happy with quite how the space looks or feels or ‘works’... So I sometimes question if it would have been better to be content with the room as it was... and then really LIVE in it, and in the rest of the house, with gratitude and enthusiasm.

Such paradoxical thoughts and lessons I am taking from this experience, this process... Firstly, I take gratitude for the many different spaces I have lived in, and a greater awareness of how each one has deeply affected – for good or ill – how I live and experience life and relationships. I recognise more clearly that part of the relational strain my family experienced as I grew up truly did stem from four humans of over 5’11’’ sharing a small ‘trailer’ home (though as a WW1 era wooden caravan it had some added appeal and ‘cool factor’ that the word trailer cannot convey!) with very little opportunity for space or privacy from each other. Likewise, the happiness of the first four years of Amelie’s life were beautifully enabled by a house whose living space flowed well, by the big kitchen/dining room where it was so easy to be together, cook, play, and hang out with friends and family, and by those unnecessary but wonderful luxuries such as two bathrooms, a laundry room, an open fireplace, views of the estuary, and the incredible stainless steel, seven burner gas hob with double electric oven (yes, I admit I miss it!). I do think that the changes to our den will better facilitate our life as a family in this home. However, a beautiful space doth not a happy family make, and the other paradoxical thought that’s playing inside me is that I don’t want to limit the energy and creativity and enthusiasm and commitment I give to life, to family, to God, and to others, due to the space I inhabit. Aware that beauty and order, rhythm and flow, are important to me, I nevertheless don’t want to serve them, but instead ensure that they ‘serve’ me and those things that hold higher value for me. When they are lacking, I don’t want this to needlessly put my life on hold, until everything is ‘just so’ again! And, above all, I want to be able to be content with and grateful for how things are NOW, not always jumping ahead in heart and mind to how things could be; I long for this sort of ‘presence’ with my home and in wider spheres of life too.

So I’m thinking I could probably extend Jesus’ Matthew 6 teaching – “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” – to ask “Is not life so much more than the space we live in?”. Tonight, I love that this comes out as a question not an emphatic statement, because although I believe this to be true, quite what it means still eludes me as I pace the newly varnished floorboards, remember the manky carpet they have replaced, and long for the furniture to be moved back in so that life can begin again in this room...

Absence and presence

I’ve been pondering recently the nature of absence and presence, sparked mostly by my anticipation over months and weeks of my parents’ first visit to us in Canada, our eventual reunion after 2 ½ years apart, the wonderful three week period of holiday and shared life, and then their abrupt departure and consequent absence. I found this whole process very strange. They had not been here for so long, had never been here, and then they were here, fully here, and then they were gone again. And in all this I was and am powerless to control the realities of time and space that led to these absences and presences. I could not hasten their arrival, nor lengthen or hold onto their presence, nor change the fact of their leaving.

All of this made me realise how very material and bodily and physical my life is, and how very much I dwell in time and space, though my imagination can dwell elsewhere, and my mind baulks at what I see as the limitations that time and space create. Through this experience I have recognised to a greater degree that I am a body. Yes, I longed for their coming with excitement and nervous energy and impatience, but I prepared for their coming so very materially, by stocking up the freezer and the kitchen cupboards as I planned meals, by getting my house in order, by thinking of them every time I bought a new bar of soap or pack of toilet roll. “This may be the bar of soap we’re using while they’re here.” And it was the fact of their physical presence with me, in my home, with my friends and church community, in my town, that meant so much. When we are so far away from each other we can talk on the phone and write emails and letters; we can send gifts and cards and photos. But we cannot hug or walk arm in arm down the street or sit in the garden and drink a cup of fresh mint and lemon verbena tea together. We cannot share a meal or a film or a joke. We can’t swim or hike or kayak or whale-watch or picnic. And now we have done all these things, here. There is no substitute for bodily presence.

I’ve been listening to the beautiful, lilting Irish voice of the late John O’Donohue as he talks about the physicality of the soul, and the way in which someone’s physical presence with you brings the fullness of their soul – all they are and have experienced – into your life, while their physical departure takes this fullness away. It can be hard to really grasp the truth of this, since people are still sometimes so real to us despite distance. But now that my parents have been absent from my life, then present, and then once again absent, this truth is very real to me. Being WITH them brought a myriad of new dimensions to how I could relate to them and experience them, and they me. Our bodies and souls were in the same space at the same time. They had not been able to see, hear, smell, touch and taste our life here, but now, though they are gone, they are able to truly picture us here, in our home; and I know they have been here – that they know and understand. Thus their absence has a different quality to the absence before their presence; they are absent and yet some of their presence lingers. And this is comforting. For as the great John O’Donohue put it, “absence is full of tender presence and […] nothing is ever lost or forgotten”.