Slow starts & early nights

A love letter to my bedroom

Tracy and I have been together for twenty-three years. We used to share a bedroom but at some point, after our nieces were grown and no longer needed a bedroom in our house, we realized we should take advantage of our spare bedroom, and sleep separately.

Two humans and two dogs was just too much for one bed. We like different sleeping temperatures and different levels of tidiness. So, the dogs and I moved out into our own sleeping room.

Last year, (or the year before? I’m honestly not sure) I decided to switch the room I was using as my studio office with the room I was using as my bedroom, and Tracy gave me the gift of repainting the walls. So now, I have this fresh clean bedroom space that is my sanctuary.

I love this room.

Everything in it is something I want to be there and everything has its place. Despite advice that we should not have electronics or blue light in our bedrooms, I have those things. I have a television in my bedroom because I love to settle into my bed and watch something from the 70’s. I keep my phone on my bedside table because sometimes I put an ambient video on the TV and scroll TikTok. (Okay, a lot of the time.) I have my earbuds on the bedside table too so that I can lie in the dark and listen to podcasts or guided meditations.

There is a Christmas tree in my bedroom right now. It’s a white tree with pink lights. I love the pink glow so much, I decided not to take it down after the holidays and instead decorated it for Valentine’s Day.

I have a dresser from my grandmother’s house that I remember from my childhood when it was in my grandparents’ bedroom. I have a pie safe that I bought when I lived in New York that’s filled with jewelry and cosmetics. On the top of it, a collection of face oils and fragrances and art that my nieces made when they were children.

There is a purple kantha quilt on my bed and a white down comforter and one of those supportive pillows with the little arms, and I have a tower fan that keeps me cool all night long.

I have a small white bookshelf filled with oracle and tarot decks and on top it, a selenite salt lamp and an aroma therapy diffuser and a white cat wearing pink pajamas. There is a yoga mat at the foot of my bed.

Right now, it smells like Lattafa Bade'e al Oud Amethyste.

My bedroom is a space entirely curated by me and I am the gatekeeper of the energy there. It is not exactly a room where I go to escape, but it is a room of comfort and I need comfort right now. Don’t you?

I mean, honestly.

Self-care is always important, and it is particularly important now. Not because I want to distance myself from the things humanity is currently enduring, but because I am a part of humanity. It is my responsibility as a human to refuse to turn a blind eye to the horrors of this moment, horrors going on against the backdrop of a pandemic that shows no signs of ending.

And because I am, along with you, living in these times, I must tend to my self care along with tending to world care. As our empathy, our intuitive knowing, the domain of our hearts expands and stretches out all across social media and the globe, our anxieties also expand.

I need time plugged in, and I also need the downtown, perhaps more than the average person, in order to calm and organize my energies, in order to get clear.

Early evening, after I’ve cleaned the kitchen and Tracy and Rocky and I have settled onto the sofa , I start to feel a longing for my bedroom. The realization creeps in around the edges, I am done with this day. I need to put on pajamas, get under that comforter, and shut out the rest of the world. I need to reset.

I love early evenings and I love slow mornings, the ones when Rocky is still sleeping soundly when the coffee brews so I can bring my mug upstairs and drink it in bed while softly, gently opening to the idea of living and working another day.

I was recently talking to a friend who’s teenaged daughter is happy to spend the day alone in her room reading books and I remembered my own teenaged bedroom days. I spent a lot of time in there with the incense burning, David Bowie posters on the wall, records spinning. I spent a lot of time reclining on the futon (I had a futon instead of a bed because it was the 80s and I was…me…) reading.

I suppose the bedrooms of my life have always been my favorite rooms.

I remember when I moved from Brooklyn, where my bed was nestled into the interior space of a shotgun apartment, to the suburbs of New York, I marveled at my bedroom window through which sunlight streamed into the room and out of which I could see green grass and trees and blue sky.

My favorite bedroom of all time was the one on the right, at the top of the stairs in my grandparents’ farmhouse.

The mattress was a feather bed, tall and soft with a stack of feather pillows. I slept there beneath a blue patchwork quilt with the windows open to the cool night air. In the morning, I would wake to the sound of a rooster crowing and the aroma of breakfast downstairs.

I loved that room, loved the sensation of being tucked safely into that bed.

It’s often said the kitchen is the heart of the home; perhaps the bedroom is the secret heart, the hermit’s cave, the underground, the land of dreams, where anything impossible and nothing is required.