Entry tags:
Housework
One of the erudites on my friends' list is pondering, in locked entries, the spiritual aspect of domestic labor. Without outing them, I'm thinking about it too.
A couple of gnomic sayings:
P.S. I just made my own laundry detergent. It is bigger than yours.
A couple of gnomic sayings:
- Is it okay to chop onions while you pray? Probably not. Is it okay to pray while you chop onions? Absolutely; this is the Brother Lawrence version.
- Domestic work is solitary, like the desert. This is freedom and also danger. A man I once met on the Zephyr, going over the Rockies, lived alone on a mountain top in Nevada. I asked him what he did when he got lonely. I think of the work I have to do, he said. This same erudite person who is pondering the spiritual aspects of domestic work has noted (I hope I don't offend by quoting another locked entry but I think it was in an exchange with me) that such dust mite freaks as Harvard lawyer/laundress Cheryl Mendelson are masturbatory. Finally, on my long digressions into femme secession, I noted the beating heart of the controversal Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman, was a moment she noted of being alone in the house, cutting out a dress and icing a cake. This is a form of bliss and freedom, a plugging into the concatenation of the universe which can be seen as constantly unrolling beauty. So this would be domestic work as
- walking meditation. It's also a way out of
- fearful tempests of mental turmoil, as Kathryn Duffy, the knitting guru at Interim House, a Philadelphia halfway house has noted for her lady addicts. Knitting soothes the savage breast and can be considered a form of art or meditation therapy. There is the interesting conundrum of
- Buddhist practice: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Deborah Madison's early vegetarian recipe books are full of Tassajara Zen kneading pizza doughs (and way too much cheese, baby) and sexual betrayal;
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oneroom has pointed out to me, in re ethical godlessness, the icky sexual scandal which ravaged that whole Buddhist group and whose politics pervades Madison's book Greens. She includes about a thousand pizza recipes developed by her former Tassajara husband (way too much cheeeeeez); the recipes themselves are masterpieces but also slightly incantatory. (As compared to the recipes of the other master writer of recipes, the pastry chef Maida Heatter.) There's the - respectability sweepstakes, represented by such online bloggers as Crunchy Chicken, Riana Lagarde, or Sharon Astyk, whose greener-than-thou ethos can do much more damage than it does good. Crunchy's not the only one; there are numberless seceded women writing blogs about killing pigs in their back yards in Oakland, which is apparently the new standard of righteous housewifery, as peak oil millenarianism conflates with orthodox religious ideas (Astyk).
(My erudite friend is hilarious on the subject of generation Z discovering the virtues of canning. Oy to the vey. These people are not youths, and it is typical of these sorts of blogs (though not that one) to find people stewing up botulins and mistreating domestic animals by, for example, tethering goats in places they can destroy a neighbor's orchard (possibly poisonous to the goats) and not escape from predators. People too poor to make good fences or to take their animals to the veterinarian should not be keeping animals, much less competing to kill more rabbits with their bare hands than their peers.) It's also very much about - growing where you're planted, which is why I will never give up reading Alicia's blog, no matter how twee she gets. I am now going to search my bookshelves for a seditious book about embroidery recommended to me by the Intelligent Craftafarian, who has also had to learn to grow where she's planted. Power to the people.
P.S. I just made my own laundry detergent. It is bigger than yours.
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