'I've always found that the changes I feared would ruin me have always become doorways, and on the other side I have found a more courageous and graceful self.'
So said Elizabeth Lesser, the co-founder of the Omega Institute, the largest adult education centre in America, focusing on health and wellness, spirituality and creativity, which sounds exactly like my kind of place, how about you?
It has been a week where I have been connected with several friends who are making changes in their lives, who are taking risks, making leaps of faith, acting on feelings that they are no longer willing to tolerate their current situations for one reason or another. Is it the arrival of Spring that has instigated these feelings of change, I wonder? Or some form of fortuitous planetary alignment? The next Full Moon is still 10 days away so it can't be that. Maybe we have just all been listening to the small voices of our personal Universes and nodding and agreeing with their gentle suggestions that yes, it is time for change. Elizabeth Lesser had something to say about change, too:
'How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.'
(An interesting aside...whilst checking on the Full Moon date for March, I discovered that each Full Moon has a specific name according to Native American custom. So January was Wolf, February was Snow, March is Worm. April will be Pink, May is Flower, June is Strawberry, July is Buck. August will be Sturgeon, September is Harvest, October is Hunter, November is Beaver and December is Cold. Who knew, eh?)
I find it comforting to be amongst others who have decided to blossom into their lives. There's a sense of companionship and supportiveness, of 'We can do this thing!' We have been reassuring each other, listening and offering encouragement. I think we all know deep down that everything will be fine, and definitely better. Still, it's good to have a girly network with cheering and pompons, isn't it?
On to carpet. We want only a stair carpet. 80 cms wide and 6 metres long. Rashly, I have decided to clean up, sand and polish the landing floorboards in keeping with their cottagey heritage, and if that goes hideously wrong I'll invest in a carpet runner as a cunning disguise. Anyway, Himself and I went stair carpet shopping last weekend and as with all these things, the shops never come up with what's in your mind's eye. If the colour is right, the pile is wrong; if the pile is right, the colour is weird by having some peculiar addition of a grey or beige stripe. There is a LOT of beige carpet out there. More than 50 Shades of Beige, I reckon. I wanted a stripe. Just not grey or beige.
CarpetRight ticked the boxes with a Made In Britain wool loop striped carpet, in shades of heather and green. Bit expensive, but it was only a small bit needed, for the stairs, don't you know? The CarpetRight chap (aged 12 and three quarters) duly gave us a price. A smidge under £900!
Well! Spluttered I did! 'For a bit of stair carpet?' said I, all eye-popping agogness.
He nodded. 'You'll have a big remnant,' he said. 'Have you got another room you could use up the leftover in?' I unpopped my eyes and rolled them instead.
Turns out we'd've had to buy a full 4 metre width, 6 metres long. Meaning we'd have had three quarters of a mahoosive piece of carpet leftover once we'd taken off the quarter we needed for the stairs. He didn't try very hard, this CarpetRight person, to maybe suggest a way we could buy a piece of more suitable size so we left, came home and bought a piece on-line which is 1 metre wide by 6 metres long for the price of just under £150. Stripes in subtle green shades. Zig-zag stripes, no less. Just enough to add a bit of oomph to a neutral stairs and landing ensemble.
Some of you may be wondering why there is a guinea pig on the carpet in the picture at the top of this post. I've just been thinking about how nice guinea pigs are this week.
That's all.
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