Homebody Organizing
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Care Package Archive

Rejuvenating and practical frameworks for creating Clarity and Wellness in all areas of your life.

Coaching is sacred. This space is protected. Gates and paths open to our guides. Gates and paths closed to anyone who wishes to do us or our loved ones harm. Dedicated Protector.

Care Packages🤲🏽

You know when someone who loves you sends you a parcel with a bunch of goodies in it? I’m endeared to the care package (in whatever form it comes) as a way of making, way of caring, way of sharing. There’s no shortage of possibility as to how a care package presents, what it contains, what assortments are collected, how it’s delivered, how it’s received, and what it might mean to it’s recipients.

I value that this orientation toward making and giving can bring together items that you don’t always see together. You’re simply giving what’s needed and what might land as care. I like when a care package is a sweet collection of some practical stuffs and also things for pure enjoyment (maybe highlighting the functionality of joy and pleasure to our survival); a mix of things you can use in the long run plus some things to use right now. A box containing socks, a nice notebook, some chocolate, a bag of rice.

I like both mail and creating with the intention to give, so the Care Package holds a place in my heart. I send the people on my list a weekly (email) Care Package 🤲🏽. I write them with the intention of both holding space for all the positive possibility that you radiate, and to be of real tangible use. Ideas that you can grab onto, that make a difference in your life.

I created the Care Package Archive to collect these packages all in one place. Sign up if ya wanna receive em straight to your inbox.

CARE PACKAGE 10 🤲🏽 Your home is your friend, ally, teacher, supporter, biggest fan, & 24/7 facilitator.

Your space is alive! Your home is your friend, ally, teacher, supporter, biggest fan, & 24/7 facilitator.

Your space and things are not not alive. Your space is alive (or could be). Not only that. Your space has the full potential to be your friend, ally, teacher, supporter, biggest fan, and a 24/7 facilitator for you. Today I want to unpack what the facilitating capacity of your home is, means, does, and why it matters to you.

I talk about both function (functional organizing) and facilitation (coaching as facilitation). In Care Package 8 I wrote about the various iterations of facilitation and their importance to our wellness, growth, development, learning, and evolution. But facilitation doesn’t stop at the relationship between coach and client. I believe our homes and spaces are well positioned to be facilitators for us and literal facilities for the parts of living that are most meaningful to us.

I emphasize functional organization for you because it’s entirely possible to organize (to utilize organizational actions) but to not improve your life at all and to still be within a disabling and disempowering space. I emphasize the facilitating capacity of your home because if your space and things aren’t contributing to your life and activity, they’re probably taking away from it. We want to organize with a level of competency to create homes, spaces, choices, and structures that are enabling, empowering, and helpful to us. Otherwise, what’s the point?

To be direct, simple, and clear- your space and things ought to facilitate the functions of your life. In order to do that, decisions about your space and things need to emphasize not just the things themselves or their relationship to each other, but rather, your relationship to them, how you intend to interact with and make use of them. In other words, it’s not about the blender, or your towel, or even the blender’s relationship to the towel. It’s about you and your relationship to the blender, and it’s about you and your relationship to the towel. Stick with me.

Organizing, at it’s best, is relationship-building (forging a relationship between you and the stuff) that orients you to receive more from your space and things. The number one organizational error I see is organizing the stuff and forgetting the the reason why it’s even there and whether or not it’s fulfilling that potential. 

For example: You can organize your home entirely by color. All red things in one room, all pink in another, all green in another, and so on. Your home would technically be organized. But, not only would sorting by color not improve your life, it would create utter chaos. It would be madness for your spoons to be grouped with your jewelry or for a cabinet to contain fresh oranges and your orange water bottle, your orange hoodie, an orange bowl, some orange underwear, and a book that happens to have an orange coverjust because they share a common color. Can you imagine?

Let me break down why this kind of organizing has a low facilitating capacity and is non-functional and how you can steer clear of making less obvious but equally dysfunctional choices.

At the scale of your home, color is not so important (maybe even irrelevant) to how and why you interact with your things. For that reason, sorting by color doesn’t facilitate any of your functions. Sorting by this criteria doesn’t make any of what you do easier and would actually effectively make everything you do harder. Defeating the point of organizing, right? 

Well lets clarify what the point is, because from this example we can see that organizing itself is not enough. The isolated acts of organizing are useless if not contextualized and mobilized with a purpose. Organizing has to be in service of something. We have to have a purpose and a grander criteria that guides our choices. Otherwise, we can organize endlessly and get no where.

Let’s go meta real quick, because it’ll trickle down, contextualizing things for you and making it a lot easier to organize effectively. What’s the point and purpose? YOU. You are the point and purpose. You and your life. Your vitality, your energy, you being enlivened, you living your life, you being healthy and well, your activity, you doing things, etc. Whatever you want for your life is the point. You and your life are the focal point of any organizing you do. Organization always ought to be in service of life. In this case, organization is in service of YOU. You only need your home and your things so long as they are facilitating the functions of you and your life. 

What I recommend is to start thinking about organizing in terms of what you’re doing or want to be doing (verbs!). The kitchen exemplifies this perfectly- all the cooking things belong in the kitchen because that’s where I cook (verb). Cooking is the verb, the kitchen is the space that facilitates the functions of cooking, so all choices made around what stuff belongs in the kitchen and where exactly it belongs are based on the utilitarian nature of the space and my relationship to it. The kitchen is a great example because it’s already partially set up as a facility for our activity and the purpose of that space is clear to us. 

So to take this concept outside of the kitchen, we can consider other such activities that are important to our life and think about creating “facilities” (spaces that facilitate) for each of them. This will help you immensely in cultivating a home that is in it’s full ally/friend/teacher/supporter/facilitator potential for you. It’s not a matter of aiming to “look” organized, it’s a matter of asking yourself â€śwhat are the things i want to be able to do and how can my space facilitate?” Maybe the things you want to facilitate are resting, studying, working, training, reading, maybe other actions. You can create zones for your activity and living.

If you’re displeased with the current organization of your space it is likely because it is not facilitating a part or parts of you that you want to bring more life to. What is it that you’d like your home to offer you? What aspect of your life would you like your home to support and facilitate?

Questions you might ask yourself, your home, and your stuff in forging a productive, facilitating, functional relationship- How do I want to feel? What do I want to be doing? What is the most vibrant expresssion of my life? How do I want to be living? To the stuff- How can I help you help me? How can I help me help you? How can I position you so that you can improve this aspect of my life that I want to cultivate. What do we have in common? Are your reflecting something about me that I need to see right now? What do you want to do together? How can I care for you so that you can continue to improve my life? Where might I place you if I want to be inspired to do this thing that you facilitate so well? Is the current organization enabling and empowering? Is it facilitating my life or weighing me down?

Have a beautiful day!

Facilitation and growth to the max, 

Loretta

Originally shared 19 May 2021

Loretta Barrera