Oh my! Oh yes!

I am fully in love with Liz Lamoreux right now.

Every morning I get up early to help Terry out the door. I've been doing it for years now. Some people think I'm nuts for doing this, but the truth is, I'm a really light sleeper so if I didn't help him I'd just be laying awake in bed watching him. So I get up. I make his coffee and bagel, pack his lunch into his cooler and kiss him goodbye.

Sometimes, if I'm ferociously tired, I go back to bed. Though that never seems like a good idea when it's time to get up with the girls. So I try not to do that. I stay up and have some time to myself. Mostly I watch PVR'd shows or surf. But that isn't very productive or fulfilling. It feels like I've wasted precious alone time.

I've been reading a lot of posts on Leo Babautas site lately. One post talked about creativity and how to make it a habit. I have clicked through so many posts, reading and nodding, that I can't pinpoint which one said to do something creative first thing in the morning. Before you do anything else.

I figured I'm already up, why not try this. So instead of vegging yesterday morning while I waited for the kids to get up I worked on sorting photos (more on this later).

Now, an odd part of my personality is that I crave solitude and silence but often find being alone a tad eerie. Hence spending so much of my alone time surfing or watching telly. Or, yeah, eating.

But I wanted to do this. Which brings us back to Liz. I remembered that I'd been wanting to listen to some of her recorded messages on her site. But good lord does my attention wander at warp speed in front of the computer. This girl can barely sit through a YouTube video.

Solution? I turned on a video and worked while I listened. Brilliant. I got so much done with a soothing voice in the background. More than I've done in months.

Then it happened. Liz said something so brilliant, so true, that it literally made me yell YES! As she was talking about "your corner" and making it beautiful she was talking about bits and pieces of stuff. It could be anything. Doesn't matter. What she said was "Those stories can't sing if they're in Tupperware boxes".

Isn't this so true? So true. The fact that I have my grandmothers camping journals doesn't matter if I don't know what bin to find them in. The fact that I have pictures of my beloved childhood toys doesn't help me if they're in a jumbled mess and there is no journaling beside them to say that I actually loved those toys and wish they were still around. And all the pretty paper in the world is only clutter if I'm afraid to cut into it and it's just sitting there.

I am resolving to finally let go of my fears, and more importantly my inertia, and empty those bins. Clear my corner and make it sing.

Perhaps if I show you an embarrassing picture it will help to motivate me to clear it up so I can show you a pretty picture.

Here you go, the ugly truth. It's kind of colourful and treasure-seeking-ish but the truth is, it's dysfunctional. To even find something I know I have takes so long I give up, turn off the light and go away.