Housework, Soulwork

Shall I strip the sheets off the bed?” I asked my friend, a prolific writer who happens at the moment to be between books.

“No, no, leave them,” she insisted.  “I’ll change the sheets.  I love having an excuse to interact with my house.”

An acclaimed novelist whose books settle onto bestseller lists for months at a time, she is also, in her heart of hearts, the happiest of housewives.

When I visited her in May, the two of us stayed up way too late talking about other writers we know, ideas for new projects, the books we were in the midst of reading, the ones we’d set down before finishing.  And then, in the morning, we made breakfast smoothies, hauled out a stack of cookbooks and her notebook full of clipped and saved recipes, and perched on stools in the kitchen, comparing notes on our favorite vegetarian dishes.   We took time to admire the brief, sudden bloom of the climbing rose bush in the back yard, to take her dog for a long walk around the neighborhood, to check on the herbs growing in pots on the porch.

I loved interacting with my friend’s house, too.  It is a well-loved home, not grand or flashy or huge, but warm and nurturing and soulful, tended with care and deeply inhabited.

I’ve thought of my friend’s response often over the last few weeks.  What’s stayed with me, I realize,  is not only the beauty of the life she’s created but also the simple joy she allows herself in each day’s doings — joy she experiences fully and without second guessing her efforts, whether she’s sitting at her desk and crafting the first lines of the novel she’s been working out in her mind for months, or taking an elderly friend to the grocery store, or spending twenty minutes at the stove caramelizing onions, or (as she always insists on doing), driving me to the airport, even if it’s rush hour.

What  freedom there is in such joy: the freedom of not judging our work but choosing instead to see the value and the meaning in all of it.  There is, after all —  as my wise friend has figured out — no hierarchy, other than the one we impose on ourselves.

Who says that an Op-Ed in the Times is more important or meaningful than an arrangement of fresh flowers in the guest room or a pizza made from scratch? And yet, how tempting it is to draw that line, and then to start right in analyzing and evaluating.  How reverently we place the “creative” work above the line (this matters!), and consign everything else a lesser status – the dishes in the sink, the recycling to be sorted, the vegetables to be chopped, the dried mud to be swept from the floor.

I do the dishes and sort the bottles and chop the veggies. I stay on top of the routine household chores. But I often catch myself rushing, too, distracted and contrite, as if the keeper of some invisible Writer’s Time Clock is frowning down upon my domestic labors and finding me wanting, failing to live up to larger expectations.  “What, you spent two hours putzing around in the garden this afternoon, and you didn’t get a single paragraph written?”

Perhaps it’s because  writing doesn’t come easily to me that I always feel as if everything else I do, even the most essential domestic task, is really just some slightly disguised version of  playing hooky.

A choice between a mountain of laundry to fold and a blank page?  No contest.  Give me the dirty clothes! I actually love the beginning, the middle, and the end of laundry duty – from the physical exercise of lugging the heavy baskets down two flights of stairs to the washing machine in the  basement, right through that moment when everything is neatly stacked and sorted back upstairs on my bed, socks matched and rolled the way my husband likes them,  t-shirts folded into squares, towels in thirds, dish cloths ready to go back in the drawer.  But it’s a guilty satisfaction. I know that writing is harder, that I’ve chosen the easy way out.

“You should be doing something more meaningful, more productive with your life, than folding pillow cases,” my inner critic chides.  “You haven’t written anything for a week,” she reminds me.  “What kind of writer are you, anyway?”

The answer, at the moment, is: I am a writer who isn’t writing much.

After a year of daily writing to finish a book, and then months spent on and off the road trying to sell it, my writing self seems to have  declared a sabbatical. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to catch up on my email.  I’ve mailed off a stack of hand-written thank you notes and birthday cards.  I wrote my first guest blog post (yes, a deadline is helpful), a few comments on Facebook, daily grocery lists.  I’ve spent time working on a book of quotes I’ve collected for a friend, from books we’ve shared and loved – nice pens in different colors, careful penmanship, the pleasure of copying beautiful sentences onto beautiful paper, of being reminded all over again of the indelible potency of language.

Other than that, I’m afraid I don’t have much to show for myself, writing-wise.

But my house! Finally, the screens are in, the kitchen floor is washed, the outdoor pots are spilling with blooms.  There are fuschia rhododendrons in the vases.  Tender sunflower seedlings are growing by the stone wall, spinach and arugula and lettuce from the garden will fill the salad bowl tonight.  My closet is clean.  I bought a new tablecloth for the dining room table, got the spots out of the old placemats, ironed the napkins. For the first time since before Christmas, we’ve had friends over for dinner.  It felt so good to sit around the table, catching up with loved ones and watching the candles drip down that, two nights later, we did it again.  I’ve been pulling out my own cookbooks, trying new dishes. Stuffed peppers on gorgonzola polenta, roasted eggplant with buttermilk sauce, kale pesto, haddock Florentine.  Perhaps the subtle creative forces haven’t abandoned me after all; it could be they are just assuming a different form, recharging in the kitchen amidst the makings of dinner.

In a couple of days, Henry will leave for his summer job on the Cape; this week, every last meal and shared moment feels like an occasion.  Soon we will be two here again, re-adjusting to silence and solitude. Last night, while Steve mowed the lawn and Henry practiced the music for Die Fledermaus (he’s determined to know the scores for all nine summer musicals by Friday), I made pasta and roasted vegetables and marinated steaks for the guys. The windows were open, the scent of fresh-cut grass wafting through the kitchen, the sound of the lawnmower a steady comfort.  My husband and son and I were all absorbed in our labors, busy and peaceful and content.

The Keeper of the Time Clock was silent.  Perhaps she’s finally gotten the message:  there is no line.  There is nothing to judge.  No one else cares how many words I write or how clean my floor is.  And the only thing that really matters is the attitude  I bring to the task at hand, whatever it may be.  What I aspire to this summer, then, is this: to do my work, all of it, with conscious intention.  With love, not judgment.  And with gratitude for the great gift of this life, for its countless blessings and small miracles, and for the daily actions of living that create a home for the soul, a place where both joy and effort can flourish.

As so often happens, in the midst of writing this post, I came across a poem that spoke directly to my heart.  Thank you, Claudia Cummins at First Sip, for the beauty and inspiration  your lovely site brings across my threshold each weekday morning.  And yes, yes:  “One must never ignore the instinct to create” — be it scones or novels, a poem or a terra cotta pot overflowing with pale petunias. There is no line, just our own beautiful offerings, our songs.

Irreverent Baking 

I should be upstairs with the others, drumming up ways
to heal the world, save the animals, pray for water
in a far-off continent, devote the remainder of my days
to a catalog of restorations. But this morning it was the matter
of scones that drew my gaze, and my feet remained
planted in the kitchen. One must never ignore the instinct
to create, is what I told myself, and soon the counter was stained
with flour, my hands sticky with dough, the house inked
with the smell of blueberry possibility, and I knew I was not wrong.
This was my prayer, my act of healing, my offering, my song.

~ Maya Stein

 

P.S.  I’m always amazed at they way my online friends and I find ourselves connected by invisible threads of inspiration.  Coincidence or synchronicity that Dani Shapiro and I have echoed each other today — giving voice to that question that apparently haunts us both, though in different ways:  What kind of writer are you?  To read her thoughtful reply, click here.