Creating beauty inspires cleaning house

A couple of days ago, I got an overwhelming urge to make window stars. These are popular in the Waldorf school movement. They are made from kite paper from Europe. My mother--my crafty but oh so busy mother--had the paper and a book on how to make them and I asked her if I could use them. So for the last three days gorgeous window stars have been blooming. Today we started putting them up on the windows.

The window stars have inspired Jasmine to clean. Yesterday she rescued her dollhouse from the back room and cleaned it and today helped me with deep cleaning the dining room to honor the beauty of our window stars.

Several nights ago, I checked up on all the homeschooling blogs I have links to. A post about cleaning and chores on The Sparkling Martins has been at the edge of my mind ever since. Dana writes that her children help with housecleaning without any coersion because she's always cleaned with joy. I have aspired to this but it has not happened. Actually Jasmine does joyfully help with chores fairly often BUT...this girl knows how to create a mess and definately has a different standard of cleanliness than I. We live in a fairly small house with my cluttery mother and I am sensitive the clutter so....I want Jasmine to keep her things neat.

We've tried to come to solutions that are mutually acceptable mostly to no avail. Eventually, a few weeks ago, I moved all of her stuff out of living area into the back bedroom and have allowed her to keep it how she wants as long as there is a pathway to my clothes.

Back bedroom-photo 1

Back bedroom-photo 2

The cool weather is finally here. Yeah. Time to get out and play. I'm feeling so vibrant and alive like the electrons in my cells are spinning faster. I am so so grateful for this living food lifestyle. I don't even want to eat cooked food.

The soundtrack for last couple days--Jasmine choose The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and I listened to a couple Bill Frisell albums Blues Dream and Ghost Town, Putumayo's South Pacific Islands, Putumayo's Brazileiro, and a Mercedes Sosa album.

This evening, Jazz handed me A Course in Miracles and said "Read this" I opened to...

"I do not know the thing I am, and therefore do not know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look upon the world or on myself.

Yet in this learning is salvation born. And What you are will tell you of Itself."

and....

"You see the flesh or recognize the spirit. There is no compromise between the two. If one is real the other must be false, for what is real denies its opposite. There is no choice in vision but this one. What you decide in this determines all you see and think is real and hold as true. On this one choice does all your world depend, for here have you established what you are, as flesh or spirit in your own belief. If you choose flesh, you never will escape the body as your own reality, for you have chosen that you want it so. But choose the spirit, and all Heaven bends to touch your eyes and bless your holy sight, that you may see the world of flesh no more except to heal and comfort and to bless."

I am filled with waves of gratitude that I have been led on this path and my little angel who helps remind me.