When S and I were first getting to know each other we got to talking one day about house design and the things we would look for in a home: a big kitchen, lots of space for entertaining and (I said) a place that would function as a space for quiet and reflection.? We’ve never really achieved that in the places we’ve lived but as I thought about last week’s post on the importance of creating sacred space in our lives and homes it occurred to me that I could probably take some steps toward creating that kind of a space here.
In some ways this space will have to be “virtual quiet space” since with three preschoolers and a small house, actual quiet is a little hard to come by, but perhaps it would be good for all of us to be able to sit down in a place and have the others know that we need a moment of calm and reflection.
When we moved here we bought a sturdy coffee table that has gone through several different uses (train table, coffee table etc.) before being fitted with a piece of foam from our old couch and used for extra seating as well as the spot where Su or sometimes F spends nap-time.
Above it on the wall is my whiteboard. Here’s what it looked like at 9 am this morning…
The quiet bench before its transformation. The tubs underneath hold the blankets for the futon/couch.
My whiteboard and the sign from our old house.
The other day when I was sorting through my fabric, I found this:
A nice heavy cotton, brought from my grandmother's attic.
there were several yards of it and it coordinated nicely with the curtains and the futon cover. I took off the old cover (it was just pinned on) and sewed a new cover onto the cushion. Since I had used a set of sheets for the futon cover and curtains, I had two pillow cases left over from the set which I tacked onto the edge of the coffee table as a skirt to hide the storage tubs. The coffee table is made out of solid wood so that worked just fine.
I also moved the olive wood cross that a friend made me to a more central place on the wall. That corner now looks like this:
The new quiet bench looks much more peaceful than the old one.
Hopefully it will become a good place to sit, re-focus and reflect.