Moving

In a spirit of preparation I am packing a suitcase. Sweetie, Future Housemate and I are meeting with the letting agent today at 1.30pm to, hopefully, sign contracts and get keys for our new home. I won't take the case with me then but I will want to have it ready to go.

It's interesting to do this, to figure out what I need in a new place to make it start to feel like home. In a spirit of more procrastination than preparation, here's a list of what I think I'll take:

My kettle. I love this little kettle! I pulled it out of a skip in Islington in the summer of 2004 when I didn't have a kettle and had been using an ordinary pan to boil water for tea (and washing-up, since the electric immersion heater I had in that bedsit was a much more expensive way to heat water than the gas hob). Took it home, cleaned it up a bit... and found that it works, it doesn't leak, and best of all it has a wonderful two-tone wail to let me know it is boiling, not piercing as some of the whistle kettles are but reminiscent of a distant train. I don't know what Sweetie and Future Housemate will make of it, and they may prefer to use a more modern electric kettle instead, but for that very first cup of tea in a new home it wouldn't feel right not to be using my much-beloved kettle.

Tea things, of course. Some mugs (enough for all three of us and at least one for a guest), and tea, and sugar, and spoons and a teatowel or two and I guess we'll have to buy some milk. A saucepan and a few bowls won't go amiss either, but that's more a practical concern than anything else.

Clean sheets for the bed; a pillow, and my duvet if it will fit. The flat I'm living in at the moment has become harder and harder to deal with, in housemate terms, and so I don't want to sleep there any more nights than I have to. My little rabbit, who I've had since I was small. And all the other sleeping things, and getting up things: towel (yes, I am a frood who knows where her towel is), toothbrush & paste, and so on.

A bit of piano music. I'm very much looking forward to having a piano in my home again after many years without. I can play some by memory but I want to set to work immediately on some of what I've been learning. And the other instruments I play need to come along, too, of course, though I can't fit them in the suitcase so I might need to make a few trips.

I'll bring my phone and charger, partly because it would be madly impractical not to, but mostly because staying in touch with my people is important. Too much isolation makes a home stop being a home, for me. The computer fits into this category too, but as there will initially be No Internet in the new house, it may just as well stay behind for a few days.

A rag and some soap for cleaning anything that needs it. I'm told the place has been cleaned before our arrival and certainly when we viewed it, it wasn't in bad shape. But there is something satisfying about finding the bit of dust that has been missed, about wiping an unnoticed corner of the countertop and saying, "There, there, house, I live here now and I will take care of you." (Those of you who know me well are laughing at this point and probably opening a book on how long it will take to become unbearably messy. That's not the point!)

Books. It might not seem like much but there are books that seem to make a place home or not. One has my grandmother's poetry in it, it is really like taking a piece of my prairie birthplace with me. I'll put a few others in too: short stories by Ursula LeGuin, perhaps a beloved cookbook or two. The number and type of books doesn't matter quite as much as their presence.

I've been praying Morning Prayer from the C of E website, and I can keep doing that through my phone if need be, but I want to start engaging with the books more: being spoon-fed liturgy by the internet is all well and good (especially when I am running late and the only time for me to fit the Office in is when I am on the bus or train...) but so is looking at various elements, especially the readings, in a wider context. So I'll be taking my copy of Daily Prayer, which I've scarcely touched since I bought it, and a NRSV Bible (I also have a Jerusalem Bible and a King James; I don't know yet which I prefer, and suspect it depends on the situation). I want to go to Morning Prayer at a local church sometimes but I doubt I'll be able to do it every day, and I want to establish the habit at home too. When we viewed the house there was a little table in the room that's going to be mine, and I'll put the religious books there. Also there will go my little oil diffuser/burner/whatever it is, the sort with a candle in the bottom and a cup for smellies in the top. I'll take that today too: there's much to be said for having matches and candles anyway, in case we have any trouble getting the utilities started (though this is arguably the very best time of year to have such difficulties).

Though I am not Jewish and I'm not even really very Jew-ish any more (I'll talk more about the difference some other time), I do sort of want a mezuzah. The Shema is still important to me, in a way that stops everything else even when I think of it. But I also want our home to be welcoming and comfortable for any and all who might visit, and I don't think overt religious symbols in communal areas will help much with that. I'm not sure what I'll do about this. I think maybe something to hang on the inside of the door to my bedroom would be appropriate. I'm waffling over whether I want the Shema or the Summary of Law. Some sort of illuminated text of either of them would be good. But I digress: this isn't something I'm putting in my suitcase today, it's something written on my heart.

The other ingredients that will make this place home definitely won't go into my suitcase, because they are Sweetie, and Future Housemate (I'll have to start calling her something else soon!). Their hopes and dreams for this place, along with mine, will do more to make it home than any of the objects I'm putting in a suitcase today. But the objects can be an expression of some of those hopes and dreams.

What makes a home for you? If you were going somewhere new and relatively unknown and had to take just the bare essentials to make a place feel like home rather than hostel, to make it feel like a place you could invite a friend or stranger rather than a place where you are the unfamiliar guest, what would you pack? Who would you take with you? Why?

Otherwise

I'm still quite a bit more tired than I thought. And today is not a great day pain-wise. I don't seem to be dealing with either of these very well.

Today I appear to have:

-done one load of laundry, which I am having to do again because the washer did not work right and the soap did not go in.
-written a self-indulgent blog post that is too long for anyone to want to read
-failed to do any academic work at all
-failed to do any tidying, which I was meant to be doing this morning, other than the laundry
-been a wittering, mind-wandery, silly fool in comments on other people's blogs

Bah. I don't like how this post is going.

Good things I have done today:
-thought about my Sekr1t Pr0ject (shhh!) and realised some of what I was trying to do is just prevarication and I need to go ahead and make a decision already
-prayer
-got dressed
-ate food

And I will keep making it better:
-will shortly go for a walk in the glorious sunshine; it is a nice day for prayer in the park, I think
-will teach later, which I'm looking forward to.

So there.

Itch-a-Sketch

I'm meant to be working on an essay today, it's due tomorrow. Organ improvisation and DuPré's Vespers Op. 18, and how he communicates the text (bits of Song of Solomon, Ave Maris Stella, and Magnificat) in the music, in case you're wondering, but most of you aren't! The potential to get sidetracked into Gregorian chant is very high in this essay but I've got most of an outline done, just need to keep fleshing it out with more detail until I get to my required number of words.

So, since I'm meant to be working on an essay, I've actually been thinking profoundly deep theological thoughts pissing about on teh internets.

Things I've been thinking:

A post at Questioning Christian has made me think that maybe we humans go about this whole "repent and be saved" thing the wrong way around. A strong sense of the existence of God and an acute sense of my own imperfection don't seem to be enough for me to actually improve: perfectionism takes over, and I get stuck. A sense that God loves me, a sense that God's love is abundant and freely given and absolutely unconditional, has the opposite effect. I worry less about getting things 'right' or 'perfect' and just try to love the world as much as I can, with God's help. The perception of God's love in my life right now is fairly embryonic, I'd say. My conscious awareness of it can be fleeting and I am most unaccustomed to feeling this way. But it's there sometimes, and it seems to be growing. And I think that is good. And I think, maybe, that is making it easier to improve.

I read a lovely webcomic called xkcd. This comic has been stuck in my head since it was posted last week. I keep thinking, "Hey, there's a cross in the etch-a-sketch, what does that mean?" and I know it's just how the thing works, nothing deliberate, and I'm pretty sure the author didn't mean any reference to Christianity. But...it itches. There's a cross in the etch-a-sketch. I feel that way about Christianity in general, I think: I know it fits somewhere in my life, but I'm really not sure about the how and where of it. Perhaps could fit somewhere is more accurate: I'm still not convinced it has any truth to offer that other major religions do not touch on in some way, and many of the reasons I feel drawn to Christianity now could very well be social and personal rather than based on any profound spiritual uniqueness. But the etch-a-sketch could have had a triangular mechanism, and the reasons it doesn't are pragmatic, not aesthetic. Maybe it's okay for some of my approach to spirituality to be pragmatic, too.

I'm not sure how those two things relate to one another, but it does feel like there's some connection.

Pragmatism says it is well past time for me to eat lunch.