Creating Positive Energy and The Human Spirit

Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts. It's what you do with what you have left. ~Hubert Humphrey

We had a party this month. Doing so gave us an excuse to drop everything and clean up the yard and house. I say we, because my son was the one hosting the party, so he was uncharacteristically eager to help get things ready. And help he did. He did an awesome job with the yard, mowing the lawn, planting flowers, getting rid of all the weeds, building a fire pit, complete with a circle of bricks, even sweeping the front porch.

Me, I focused on the communal areas inside. Living room, dining room, kitchen, and bathrooms. To make room for everybody, we took everything out of the living room that didn’t need to be there. Over the course of the past few months, in part due to working at home, I’ve sort of expanded my work area to include the living room chair for reading comfort and the dining room table for organization. Little by little, books and manuscripts and research materials were piling up around my favorite chair, and the coffee table had been pulled over as a makeshift desk of sorts.

Very cozy. Very comfortable. Very messy.

It’s been two weeks since the party, and we’ve managed to keep everything clutter free. It’s a joy just to walk into the open space and feel the positive energy. Instead of trying not to look at the mess and mentally muttering to myself several times a day that “I need to do something about that,” it’s done.

But I need space to work, and I like to be comfortable. A few manuscripts have already found their way back to the dining room table. One night I spent about twenty minutes looking for a missing chunk of manuscript. Thought I was a whole lot further along than I was, until I noticed 90 pages were missing. That set off my “something’s missing” meter, and I couldn’t settle down again until I knew where it was. The other day, I went around collecting portions of several more manuscripts. Made a list, and checked everything off, to make sure nothing was missing. Those then made their way to the coffee table. So little by little things are creeping back out into the common area, as I settle in for the next round of work.

I’m not sure what the balance is. Maybe it’s just to be comfortable when I work, and to have an uncluttered place to put things when I’m done. Not quite there yet, but working on it. My office is next on the list of rooms to be de-cluttered.

In the meantime, the strawberry plants are growing, the flowers are blooming and spreading (I think it’s amazing how they do that), and the house is really getting in shape. One by one I’m going through the rooms and cleaning things out, making room for more good and positive things to enter my life. Louis’s situation remains the same and just that. He still has not been told why he is being held in administrative custody, and remains housed on Death Row, in a bizarre twist to his life in prison. He says nothing like this has ever happened to him before and no one can or will give him any answers as to why he is being housed there. Anybody else who has been in those cells has been gone within 2-3 days. Louis has been there now for 7 weeks. He’s hired an attorney to help him simply get back into population. Mail comes in fits and starts, and I hear from him about once a week. It’s the same on his end. He says 8 – 10 days will go by in between letters from me, and then several will arrive in a bunch. On my end they are all sliced open, and taped shut again. One letter arrived sliced open but not taped shut. So they are reading his mail, both incoming and outgoing. I’m not even sure some letters are getting to him. His newspaper wasn’t being delivered for the first three weeks—well, it was being delivered to the institution, but not to him. He spends most of his days writing grievances for property that keeps going missing—and then magically reappears. Food, sweats, sneakers, books, legal papers. He’s saving his one phone call per month for his attorney.

But through it all, he remains positive and upbeat, and continues to be a living example of the axiom that even when you can’t control your circumstances, you can control your attitude, and that the human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen to it.