As blossoming trees and budding flowers reemerge across the DU campus, the arrival of spring also presents new opportunities for freshening up indoors. Eliminating clutter, playing with color and cultivating your own in-dorm greenery can be fresh pick-me-ups to celebrate the sprouting of spring.
The term “spring cleaning” acknowledges the common desire to erase traces of wintertime and start anew by scouring and redecorating our living spaces.
While some students living in the dorms are exempt from tackling bathrooms and kitchens, tidying up and rearranging furniture, especially within a dorm-room-sized place, allows for new energies, thoughts and motivations to appear and manifest along with the rebirth of the natural world.
Although it may seem like a no-brainer, eliminating unimportant items from desktops and shelves is the first essential step toward attaining a more purified living space. Begin with clearing out purses and backpacks, which will propel the rejuvenation process significantly; for those who drive, gutting out a messy car also creates a sense of renewal and provides a noticeably clearer aura to one’s vehicle, another frequently inhabited space.
When the air feels clean, fresh and clutter-free, so does the mind.
Perhaps the most awakening aspect of springtime is the reintroduction of color to the black-and-white world of winter. Each hue possesses its own frequency and wavelength in relation to how it reflects white light, therefore emitting a specific mood and energy in the mind of the beholder.
Get creative as you cover your walls with bright photographs or doodles or even just pretty paper. Allowing your dwelling to mirror the eruption of color beyond the walls of a residence hall or apartment complex will add a certain sense of refreshment to your room.
Red is commonly known, among artists, to increase vitality and self-confidence. Orange ignites happiness, confidence and resourcefulness, while yellow enhances clarity and self-esteem. Green inspires balance and self-control and blue is beneficial to knowledge, health and decisiveness. Indigo expands intuition and understanding. Violet allows for recognition of beauty, greater creativity and inspiration.
The city of Denver experiences roughly 300 days of sunshine per year and now that we’re entering the sunny season, consider keeping some sort of plant in the windowsill.
The benefits of maintaining indoor plants exist in undeniable abundance. Because plants increase humidity levels, thereby eradicating the amount of dust in any one place, they are known to decrease the potentiality of catching a cold. They also purify the space in a sense, absorbing CO2 and emitting purer, more highly oxygenated air.
Witnessing a living being flourish and grow may also be considered a therapeutic process, symbolic of the personal and emotional growth which often accommodates the introduction of new seasons. Herbs such as oregano, parsley, thyme and cilantro are easy to grow and require very little space to do so.
By embodying the rejuvenation of springtime within our most highly inhabited areas, we are able to channel the sense of regrowth characteristic of springtime, creating for ourselves a clean slate on which to reignite our own personal development.
Tidying, acknowledging the beauty in color and transferring energy into other living beings are excellent, nearly effortless ways to begin the process of spring cleaning.
