The Basement

For the past 14 years of living in my rural New York home, I've hated my basement.

It's dark, has mud floors (it's always damp so the dirt is usually mud), contains thousands of living spiders and easily as many white spider body shells (I'm told the spiders molted out of them...so it's not a dead spider, it's a spider body...that means the new spider is BIGGER than the white shell that's left behind...that means I have a whole basement of BIGGER spiders!).

The stairs down into it are broken - the ones from inside the house and the ones from the bulkhead doors in the back yard. 

The only thing we do in the basement is carry 40 pound bags of salt from the car to the salt system. Those bags are heavy and awkward...and the stairs are broken so it's hard to get them down into the basement easily.

For most of the first decade in that house, I had the chore of buying the bags, carrying them across the lawn and into the basement, slitting them open with the old rusty knife we leave next to the water conditioning system, heaving the bag up to my chest level, and dumping the salt pellets into the huge vat. Bag after bag. Year after year. 

When my partner moved in, he started helping me with the salt. Then my son got big and strong enough and we made it a family gig - none of us enjoyed it, but it went faster if we did it together. 

But we still hated the basement...me, most of all. It was usually my job to do the inside part of the project because they are both taller than I am and the ceiling (with all the spiders) is low and unfriendly. So I do the indoor part and they do the carrying to/from the car and carry out the empty bags. 

Last week, my partner and I were working together to repair a corner of the basement where some dirt had fallen in. We're having that area of the foundation repaired soon and we needed to prep it for the folks with the concrete/cobble stone skills. [Did I mention I live in an 1825 farmhouse? It's got a lot of character.]

While I was down there, pretty much hating every minute of it, I suddenly realized it would not get better unless I decided to make it better. I decided then and there that I wanted to love my basement. Or at least make friends with it. 

Some people think that a person's house represents their consciousness. And the basement would be the subconscious. Others think the house represents all areas of your life...and if the foundation is hated, unloved, and just generally uninviting, then all areas of your life will be impacted because they don't have something solid on which to stand. 

I'm not sure if either of those things are what drove my decision, I just know I feel pretty strongly about it. I want to clean it up, make it feel inviting. Maybe even do daily meditation or kata...or grounding (barefeet on the earth) in the winter. It's too cold to do it outside in the snow in January, but I could do it in my own basement that rarely gets below 45 degrees. 

I'm curious what might shift in me and in my life as I clean up and fall in love with my basement, my foundations, my subconscious. What will I need to let go of to start feeling comfortable down there? What will I need to add? I really don't know. But I'm oddly excited to find out. 

I'm starting on December 2 - after the holiday weekend. I'll try and post updates as I go along. I'm also doing a special advent calendar gig with Joanna Hennon (www.joannahennon.com) where we clear and release whatever is still stuck in our heads and hearts as we come to the close of the year and the decade. I think that's the perfect accompaniment to my project and I'm sure the two together will lead to something completely new. I don't have any idea what, but I'm looking forward to the journey. 

Is there something you want to let go of? Is there something that needs cleaning up in your mind, house, life? What if you take a step in that direction? What if it's safe to shift it toward more of what you want? 

(The picture is not my basement..I'm at my sister's house in Massachusetts writing this blog so I chose something almost as bad as mine from free images on Unsplash. Thanks to isaac jarnagin on Unsplash!)