My life is quite a mess at the moment. My home is messy, my garden is messy, my children are messy, my marriage is messy, and my book? Let’s just say I believe in (and am open to) miracles.

Though I resisted messy for many years, assuming life would feel better if somehow made neater (and beating myself up for my seeming inability to get it that way), my relationship with messy is changing.

Sure, I still experience satisfaction after cleaning out the fridge or catching up on laundry or enjoying an uncharacteristically predictable week with my kids. And yes, I’m reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (like everyone else from here to Japan), but given years of mess management (and ease seeking through mess management), it’s clear to me that attempts to neaten things in any realm of my life provide but a shallow satiation of my longings.

In fact, neatness, as a goal, seems to stand in the way of what my soul craves most. 

This has been a particularly messy year for our family. We moved back to the states, started two separate businesses (meaning that we’re both self-employed for the first time {your prayers are welcome}), are adjusting to a new town, and have done are doing the crazy-intense work needed to heal a wounded marriage.

There’s been nothing tidy about this year. And our growth has been off the charts.

This has me thinking:

Maybe we’ve been misled when it comes to the “messier” aspects of life (and I don’t mean our junk drawers). Maybe messy isn’t a reflection of our shortcomings at all. Maybe the real source of our struggle stems from the belief that life is supposed to be tidy. 

I am a life coach. For a minute there, I wondered whether I ought to be coaching others while immersed in so many messes of my own.

But then I checked that thought, examined it for truth, and got good and clear on my mission:

To support and encourage mothers toward the realization of their fullest potential and the reclamation of motherhood from disempowering personal and cultural stories. 

In doing so, a personal truth emerged for me:

Joy will be there waiting when we’ve adequately tidied our lives, is simply another disempowering cultural story. A story that has an entire generation of humans (and particularly mothers) feeling bad about ourselves, scrambling to “keep up,” and futilely spending billions in attempts to find solace.

So, along with perfection-seeking, heart-hardening, self-sacrificing and resentment holding (to name a few), I’ve now added mess avoiding to the list of behaviors that no longer serve me. Why?

Because it occurs to me that the experiences in my life that I value most have also among the messiest:

• The dream following
• The baby tending
• The daughter rearing
• The heart holding
• The vulnerability braving
• The language learning
• The attempts at understanding
• The growing, teaching, learning, and holding space for
• The moving abroad and time among the Maya
• The dance parties, the camping trips, the home births, the friendships held close from afar

And now? The building of soul-born businesses.

Our current cultural obsession with order and neatness and “cleaned up” versions of normalcy isn’t just about aesthetic preference. We aren’t Pinterest addicted organization junkies for the actual satisfaction these things bring us. We are attempting to satiate deeper, universal longings.

But so often, when we try to go deeper — when we dare that level of vulnerability and potential pain — things start to feel messy, scary and unsettling. The deeper we dig, the less magazine-like our lives look. So we assume we’re doing something wrong, back pedal, and settle for cleaner closets (or some put-together-looking equivalent).

But we’re not doing it wrong. We’ve merely been misled, misinformed and overly marketed to.

Lately, I’ve found myself taking this idea up a notch. I’ve even been choosing friends through a subconscious series of questions:

Can you see the sacredness in my mess?

Will you remind me that it’s sacred when the shit storms pick up strength?

Will you honor it as sacred even when the beauty gets buried?

Will you dare to share your sacred mess with me? 

It’s the heart-led who make the cut. Those willing to roll up their sleeves and get messy on purpose.

If you were to hire me as your coach, I wouldn’t help you clean up your messy life, because your mess is not your problem. Instead, we’d gently urge your messes out from the shadows, determine which ones no longer serve you, explore ways to best manage those you rather love (dust and all), and create others that reflect who you are, where you want to go and what you need to thrive. 

There’s more joy to be found in an intentional mess than in any amount of order that leaves your soul unseen and starving. 

My home is messy, not because I enjoy chaos, but because I value many things more than I do “tidy.”

My garden is messy, not because I’m a bad gardener, but because this is not the season for growing food, this is our season for growing businesses, daughters and local community.

My children are messy, not because I’m failing as a parent, but because we encourage them to practice being human without shame or the need for perfection, and practicing for humanhood is messy work. 

My marriage is messy, not because we’re doing something wrong, but because we’re still married.

I do like order, and maintain it best I can, within reason. But the longer I live, the more clear it becomes that “tidy” is simply not a worthy goal.

I’d rather shoot for a mess I feel proud of.

In deep,

———–

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