MAKE HOLY

A dear friend of mine, Susan, sent me a wonderful book a couple of months ago.  It is called "SIMPLE ABUNDANCE" and I read it every morning. It is a book of days and obviously, I'm on June 1 today.  The author is a woman, Sarah Ban Breathnach,  who has inspiring thoughts on the art and joys of being a woman, a wife, a mother, a cook, a housekeeper, a lover, a teacher, (you can fill in more...)  Her insights really make me stop and think and maybe rearrange my life just a little bit each day.  She brings authenticity to the art of being a homemaker, which unfortunately, has become a disgraced and a lost art. It is too bad that we, as women of the 21st century, do not take the same kind of pride in homemaking as the women of the 19th century. We are just too busy.

I was contemplating laundry day.  Years ago, a woman set aside one day a week to do the washing.  It took all day and was quite a chore.  Today, of course, every day can be wash day and the job is much easier. We put less and less time in the simple joy of making our family's clothes look nice, though.  We grab clothes from the dryer in any kind of rumpled state and throw them on.  I still iron, but I know few women who do.  Not that I'm better than them, I just find it to be a meditative process. I like doing it.

In today's article, Breathnach writes of the Goddess, Hestia, who has deemed that housework is holy.  Hmmmm, some days it seems far from that. So I found one of my paintings, a facing page from my elf book, and I wrote a little script for the inside.  I might make it into a print for women like me to put in our laundry rooms, just as a reminder that the things we do matter.