"This life I lead, setting pictures straight, squaring rugs up with the room - it suggests an ultimate symmetry toward which I strive and strain. Yet I doubt that I am any nearer my goal than I was last year, or ten years ago, even granted that this untidy world is ready for such orderliness."
   ~E.B. White

I like to re-evaluate. I love looking around my little house and altering it in my mind - adding, subtracting, and adjusting in a continual pursuit of domestic beauty. I like standing before the Icons in the early morning and re-evaluating my spiritual state. I like to make grand plans and form dreams of perfection. I like them most for being unattainable - for being dreams I can and will discard at a moment's notice for new and better dreams and aspirations. I like them because they shape my life without dominating it, they help me strive for a living beauty, one that belongs in everyday life, with all it's dirt, dusty shelves, and spiderwebs I haven't the heart to take down.

I do dust my shelves, and sweep my floor, but the life we live is one that doesn't allow for perfection. We track in dirt, we're visited by spiders, and some choose to stay. I don't like houses that are too clean though, they make me worry I might damage something. So I dust my shelves and sweep my floor, but my flowers sit too long in their little vases and I let the spiders that are not too big live up among the herbs on the ceiling. But I'm always in pursuit of my own version of perfection: domestic beauty that lives, thrives, and changes with the seasons.