blustery, beautiful fall (By Laura)

We are in it!  It's autumn!  I love it!  Aaaah!

We happily welcome the wearing-pants, cozy-drinks,warm-inside-and-cool-outside days.  Today is a windy, grey. wet day, and I love it!

I've been expressing a lot of our difficulty lately on the blog.  I'm aware of it.  In fact, it has been a very challenging few weeks.  I can't quite describe it adequately except to say that apparently making a counter-culture change that requires courage and a shift of mindset is not as easy as we anticipated! What I can say, though, is this.  Along with the nerves and the hard parts (in fact overwhelming those things) is an intense assurance that we're on a good path.  Not only that, but we're REALLY excited!

It is actually fun to set up the house for showings.  I'm not kidding.  The kids even get a bit excited about it.  Setting things up as perfectly as possible, pretending that we live in a pristine environment all the time...hahaha.

Things are exciting.  We are excited about the potential of a smaller home, and a larger life.  We are excited about having less stuff to clutter our home, our minds, our time, our bank account.  We are excited about being more generous*, more open to possibilities, more adventurous, less tied down to debt, less reliant on every dollar, less embarrassed for having "more".  (Okay, that last one is one of my skeletons that have been unleashed throughout this process.  Have I mentioned it's been a challenging few weeks?  I've met some deep parts of me that I have kept hidden for a good long time... If for the inner-purge alone, this has been a really meaningful process.  I feel another blog post coming on about just that!)

* Aaaand if I can just speak into that comment about being more generous.  Ryan and I are true believers in giving, no matter how much we have, and even if it hurts a bit.  We don't feel that having more money makes us any more able to give than we are now.  It just excites us to truly (potentially) have more to give.

So we are feeling great.  The cloud of the past few weeks has lifted off my head.  I can't tell you how dark and dreary it was for me.  (Ryan has a different experience himself...) I couldn't think straight, and instead just had to hold on to what I knew made sense when we made this decision.  The clouds have cleared (the metaphorical ones, at least) and I'm back on track as eager as before, if not more.

So here's to squishing ourselves smaller and smaller!!  Bring it on!