Accepting my housing situation

After I return from Canada to Nimbin in mid-2016, I stand on the back deck and weep.

I am overwhelmed by the tasks confronting me.

Karl’s guidance comforts me and helps me to accept my situation.

I write to him:

“I need to relax into the knowledge that you are here and not to turn it into an effort. So, please, please help me. And I will help myself. And I will be healed and move on.”

Seeing me revving up for the great push forward (selling the Nimbin property and moving to Brisbane), Karl is understandably cautious:

Take it easy and slowly, Beloved. You are getting there. Soon you will not know yourself for all you can do. Believe me. You also need to be joyous, my dearest one. We made this beautiful house with our own hands, and we want to find a new family to love and protect it.

The next day, as I lament the suffering I have endured during my five months of grieving, Karl reassures me:

Please do not be despondent — it’s five months in a life of thousands of months. You are already so much stronger than you were before you went on your overseas holiday. You have much more stamina and energy. Now let’s take it one day at a time, relishing every day we have.

IT’S ONLY A HOUSE

Selling a home under any conditions can be a stressful and even heartbreaking experience. Place attachment is a powerful emotion, especially at times like these. I know that my heart and the Nimbin house were tightly knitted together, almost indistinguishable from each other. I participated in every decision about the dreaming, design, building, and furnishing of our Nimbin house.

And I continually express my gratitude for it.

Now I delight even more in our house’s many architectural features, including the magical experience of waking to the delicate, elegant patterns of morning light on my bedroom wall, glimpsed through a narrow, east-facing wall (a carefully designed feature consistent with feng shui principles) (https://sarkissian.com.au/a-most-hopeful-light/).

Years before Karl died, I record in my daily blessings journal, “I am so grateful for all I have, including the Beloved and my house!”

And now, I am selling a property I do not even own. I have to get some distance from my heartbreaking sense of attachment.

• How I will miss living in a rural paradise, awakened by the raucous laughter of a dozen kookaburras in a nearby tree!
• How I will miss spending late winter afternoons sitting on the north deck, watching a family of five wallabies relaxing and eating the new grass shoots on the lawn!

However, in my deepest heart, I believe that, with Karl on my side, I will find a buyer at the right price.

Karl echoes my views, helping me accept my situation and confront my fears:

You need to be gentle with yourself about the property sale. It’s only a house.

It’s not me. Or you. It’s a house. And, although it meant/means a lot to both of us, we lost it almost two years ago when your business failed. That was a crisis, then! So please do not grieve over a property we already lost. You have to release this property now. If you do not do that, it will never sell.

Just release it now.

It was our house, and now it’s time to pass on its beauty, joys, and comforts to others who can love it as well as we did.

I do try to follow Karl’s advice about acceptance.

Back in 2014, I’d blogged that “the sun also rises” on a house when you do not have your name on the title: 

The sun also rises, and the sun goes down and hastens to its place where it arose. It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is deprived of its warmth.

I said, “We come and go, and the Earth remains” (https://sarkissian.com.au/sun-also-rises/).

What I mean is — through the same trees — with the same birds singing — the same sun still rises and sets — whether your name is on the title of the property or not. The same kookaburra arrives for a peek at life at dinner time. His or her same family members laugh in unison from the neighboring tree. The same rainbow lorikeet dreams in the same bottle brush tree.

The same joey suckles with his same wallaby mother.

But now, two years later, having lost so much, I struggle to embody my previous upbeat philosophy about home ownership. I cannot shake my great sadness.

Don’t focus on the loss

Karl expresses an entirely different perspective. He begs me to focus on our adventure and our triumph:

Don’t focus on the loss. Focus on the triumph. It was a huge adventure. We learned so much. Please accept that we will always have our memories.