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Organized Chaos

8/17/2015

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If there's one thing that an impending household move will do, it will create chaos. Physical chaos; emotional chaos; financial chaos; career chaos; family chaos; friend chaos, and even furry animal family member chaos. From the moment just a few weeks ago when we found the perfect farmhouse, our life has been turned upside down in ways that we had forgotten happen when you purchase a house and try to sell your current home simultaneously. Chaos, however, isn't necessarily a bad thing. An initial state of chaos can instigate responses and reactions which can then produce some pretty terrific outcomes. Sometimes you just have to welcome chaos in order to just get beyond it and to keep moving forward. 
Chaos 
When the present determines the future, 
but the approximate present does not 
approximately determine the future.   
                               Edward Lorenz
PictureWith three dormers, our house has loads of cute and convenient storage cubbies under the eaves. This cubby is large enough to be called a walk in closet.
"Bring it on," we said, and it came. The fast moving nature of our house purchase brought on a flurry of confusion about where we should even start to get our home ready for sale. We blended our houses 6 years ago and both of us still have things in boxes and totes and bags that haven't been touched since. And of course we've accumulated more stuff, more junk, more items that we couldn't part with. And then just two months ago when our daughter moved to Washington, DC and to an uber small room in an uber small shared apartment, we inherited at least 12 large totes filled with her items that we've packed into the convenient cubby spaces in the dormer areas of our cottage style home. We're filled to the brim in this house and the prospect of moving all that stuff became paralyzing last week. This is the first time that we will both move together and we realize that each of us approaches moving in very different ways.  Do we pack things now? Do we declutter now? What stays? What goes? Do we panic now? 

So while we will be upsizing in living space in our new home, we are drastically downsizing in our current home, both to have it show better to prospective buyers and also so that we don't have to move all the unnecessary junk.  In just one week, we have done a deep clean of each room and have been pretty ruthless determining what stays and what goes. We've made countless trips to the dump, to the thrift store, to the clothing drop off kiosks, and have filled the curb high on our garbage pickup days - all this before having our realtor go through the house and draw up the listing paperwork. And you know what??? It feels liberating!!! 
PictureHandmade clothing and baby toys will move to our new house as keepsakes for our daughter.
From within the sense of panic and overwhelming pressure, we have come through the initial chaos to find a sense of positive reinforcement, freedom, and even sense of adventure. We've made it a competition between the two of us to see who can get rid of the most stuff...and we are both winning. We've found things that we thought we'd lost forever. We've found things that we didn't know we had. We've found things that we had borrowed from other people (years and years ago borrowed) and forgotten to return...until last week. We've found things that represented happy times in each of our lives, and of course, we've found things that triggered the whole range of emotions known on the spectrum.  

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100 children's books were rehomed this weekend and we wish the new readers many years of joy from these treasures
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Red palazzo pants that never should have been worn in public in the first place! Not moving to the new house!
As we are coming out of the initial chaos of getting our home ready for sale we find that not only do we feel lighter and freer from decluttering, but that we have a renewed sense of happiness that this house has provided for us. It is the home where we started our life together, the home we transformed in many wonderful ways. The home where we planted our annual garden that produced food that filled our freezer through the winter. The home where we welcomed new furry animal critters into our family and the home where we mourned the passing of beloved ones. It is the home where we learned so many homesteading values and started our Kumbha Moon Soap Company. It is the home where we celebrated our marriage with family and friends. 
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One of the Kumbha girlz has a real problem collecting tour guides and pamphlets and brochures at just about every rest stop or tourist kiosk she finds. It's all been recycled and she vows that she will refrain from filling the new house with similar clutter!
But as the Lorenz quote notes, "the approximate present does not approximately determine the future." While Duke Street is our current home, home will always be defined where the two of us live together. At this moment in time right now, our home is oddly organized, orderly, clean, and suspended in time until its new family decides it should be their home. Right now at this moment, the chaos has subsided but we know that there will be repeated waves of it, much of it out of our control. And we know that we have to go through it, just get through it, to get to the other side where the reality and the adventure and the life we share wait for us in our new home. 

Peace and love - Kimberly and Kellie 
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Standing still so that we can move....

8/16/2015

2 Comments

 
PictureKumbha Moon booth at Olean's Art in the Park
Seriously, it can't be nearly 3 months since our last blog post??!!! But it has, and we are ashamed to admit it! We can make all the excuses in the world but the reality is that there usually aren't enough hours in the day to attend to our two full-time career jobs before we can devote attention to family, furry family critters, our backyard farmstead, and of course to Kumbha Moon Soap Company. Whew! Just thinking about all that we try to do during the course of each loooong day, is overwhelming but, hey, we wouldn't keep doing this crazy thing called life if we didn't love each other and all that we do. 

We've had great times on a few Saturdays this summer selling at the local farmers market and have met so many new friends and customers and also reacquainted ourselves with friends that we haven't seen in years (okay, decades in some cases). That's an advantage of remaining in one's hometown, especially when it's your 35 year high school reunion weekend! We have also had several outstanding festival weekends that kept us busy for hours on end in our tent. We love to set up at events because we get to meet with people in person and there are always great questions about our products.  We've noticed that many people are very concerned about what they put on and into their bodies and we are thrilled when someone asks us to explain an ingredient that's listed on our label or asks us to elaborate on the methods we use to make our products. We love inquisitive customers and we proudly disclose all of our ingredients, sizes, weights, and production, curing, and storage methods - all to assure that each and every product is truly all natural and safe to use. 


We still continue to be humbled and blown away by the wonderful stories that our customers share with us about how using Kumbha Moon Soap Company products has changed their life in positive ways. Many people report seeing chronic skin conditions clear or reduce after using our all-natural products and people love our shampoo bar for the way it leaves their hair and the absolute pure ingredients that we use. Who know how transformative real simple soap could be?! 
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Our display is always changing!
It has been nothing short of a whirlwind during our first year and few months of business and we have worked almost nonstop during evenings and weekends to formulate new recipes, make hundreds of batches of soap, load our curing racks, and hand label each and every bar. Even though we are a little more exhausted than usual, we love every minute of it. We should be busier than ever in August to build our inventory for holiday sales and we had mentally braced ourselves for the busy batching schedule that we'd have this month. We even calculated how much time we could devote to our garden balanced with the amount of time needed to tend to Kumbha Moon Soap Company. But as you know, things in our life often take a complete change of course, and this is just about as much of a change as we've ever experienced because......

We are moving.....

Yep - it's not a big move, just a mere 6 miles away, but no matter how close or how far, moving a household (both physically and emotionally) and a home-based business to a new location means life drastically changes for a few months. It wasn't an easy decision, especially since we just undertook a major home renovation to create a dedicated studio and production space for Kumbha Moon Soap Company, but we have fallen in love with a restored 1890 farmhouse with a few acres of land. We love our modest cottage home and have efficiently and creatively used every inch of space indoors and outside, but we've yearned for a bigger home to comfortably host our friends and family and a small tract of land that we can do more homesteading (think bees, goats, chickens, berries, and loads of veggie production!). We never think small or practical, you know! There is still some paperwork that we need to finalize and closing on the house is still about 4 weeks away so we can't share all the wonderful things about our new little farmstead until we can actually call it our own, but we can tease you with this: 
We will be moving from this lovely
modest cottage style home.........
Interested in this lovely home in Olean, NY?
 Check it out here on Zillow 
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....to this spacious old 1890 farmhouse 
that's been lovingly restored by 
its current owners.
And this.....
And this too.....
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So dear friends and customers, it seems that the Kumbha girlz have to stand still with soap production for a short time while we pack up our life in this wonderful little house and reopen our boxes and treasure in a new home. And NO! We are not going out of business, we are just abbreviated our production schedule during this big life change! We are planning on carving out a special space for Kumbha Moon Soap Company in our new home and ramping back up to speed shortly after we settle in. In the meantime, we will make soap and natural body and household products in between packing and trying to keep all the pieces of our chaotic life together. Please check back to our Facebook page and to our blog as we chronicle our transition and to learn about which products we have available. If you are interested in a custom order for holiday gifting, please contact us as soon as possible so that we have plenty of time to make and cure your special items. 

Standing still so that we can move forward is a great way to describe this place and time where we are and we look forward to sharing our story with you.


Love and peace - Kimberly and Kellie 
2 Comments
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    {b}lather 

    blath-er \ˈbla-thər\
    
    verb to talk foolishly at length 
    noun voluble nonsensical or inconsequential talk or writing

    The Kumbha Moon girls write about soap, simple living,  creative impulses, and life's lather.  


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