Yesterday the topic for a few minutes anyway was my mother's letters, specifically my mother's letters from India. There's a bevy of them, two thick black binders' worth: a sort of papery airmail flock, its fluttery bounty a tribute to the power of her characteristic discipline and persistence. She was an industrious cultivator of words, good sturdy sentence-vines of them, hybrids of information and incident, bearing the fruits of clarity and nutritious common sense. Anyhow I was glorying a little just in the straightforward high number of them. Hundreds, I said. She wrote pretty much at a minimum once every two weeks. And how many of us ever manage to do something every two weeks without fail?
My friend seemed cheerfully unimpressed.
“Well of course she wrote,” he said. “There was nothing else to do, right?”
“What do you mean there was nothing to do? She was always working. Maybe especially in India.”
“She worked at home though right?”
“Well, yes, a lot of the time. Though she also taught.”
“But so I mean her mind. There was nothing for her mind in that work.”
“Oh, you think she lived in a continual mental haze, caused by all the boring household work?
“Well, work is work, right?”
I took a deep breath.
Mom's gone now; she has been for six years. But the house where Dad still lives in Minnesota was the house where she died, and so there's plenty there that still reminds the family of her. To us the house drips with the memory of her the way the trees drip after a storm that's past. Like the perennial garden that she started out behind the garage. Or the bird feeder outside the window that was her last view of things. And all the household stuff that she handled and had some feeling for: her coffee mug, her measuring cups and spoons. A big waterpot from India made of brass. Or the houseplants. Or the letters.
I went out to Minnesota just last week, in part to find the letters and bring them back home with me to copy and scan; and now that I'm back, I've spent some time looking them over and reading a few. I love them, not just for the woman who wrote them, but truly for what they say, and for the daily domesticity they describe—a domesticity incidentally practiced largely without the benefit of the conveniences and mechanical servants of the industrialized West. Which in turn means that her work as a homemaker in that faraway place can serve as an example for me as I strive at Sunnyside to do with less of all that myself: less carbon, less electricity, less machinery, less reflex-expectation of leisure and ease.
You see, the facts as I see them are these:
- The planet suffers, truly suffers, from humanity's excessive pursuit of material wealth.
- Humans suffer too from the consequences of that same pursuit. We suffer from a lack of meaningful labor. From the unequal distribution of what is truly good in life. From being too busy to attend to friendships and family. From separation from the true source of our vitality, which is in fact our home the earth.
- We must change. And if we do not change by choice, all sorts of changes will come upon us against our will; either way we end up in the same place: needing to do more for ourselves with less.
- Why not be ahead of the game? Why not change now?
- The surest way to accomplish the necessary universal change is to look homeward. Home is not just where the heart is, but where it changes too.
- On the way to change, which is to say, on the way back home, we MUST get away from the idea that physical labor, in and of itself, is dehumanizing, stupefying, a bore and a chore and a thing to do our very slippery darndest to avoid.
All of this suspicion we harbor for the domestic arts and all this abiding by the notion that they diminish our minds is in fact childish and silly. It is itself a kind of pap and candy for the mind. We suck on it as a tasty way to pretend that the way we live now is the nicest and the best. It's time to grow up and learn.
I bring up my mother and her fine letters (to her own intelligent mother) in order to say this: reading them, you sense that this was one whip-smart, complete-kit of a woman, this Karen Bjornstad living in the high hills of Southern India (foreign to her), standing in line in 1973 for any available gallon of kerosene, bargaining in Tamil for moong dhal, or bravely drawing, as part of one of those letters, a shaky but serviceable diagram of a washing machine part that needed replacing. Now you tell me: Was this woman everything she was DESPITE all that daily, largely-domestic work? Or is it just possible, and maybe even a wee-bit-more-than-passably likely, that the daily challenges of keeping a home in that place and in those days, far from dumbing her down and boring her, actually served to sharpen her mind, nerve her spirit, pump up her strength, characterize and delineate her soul?
Any venue of human existence can be a vale of soul making or field of grand endeavor, although sometimes, paradoxically, to make it so, we must actually arrange to make the work more difficult. Especially in these latter days, when machines surround us, insulating us from physical reality, defining us by what we no longer have to do for ourselves, convincing us in fact that to do without machines is to regress and become less human. As if the more machines we had, the more human we'd become!
I can almost feel the traditional feminists, the hopeful progressive technologists, and the economists who would see nothing wrong with attaching our schoolchildren by IV's to computers if that prepared them for their career--all rolling their eyes at once. Our future is limitless! they say. Resources are boundless because human ingenuity is boundless. The financialization of the economy has saved us and will continue to save us. The best measure of respect is money, and what, you patriarchal throwback, do you want us all to be making doilies again?
But I persist. I persist because I respect my own intelligence and my own experience. I persist because I myself, a capable intelligent man, do a great deal of the day-to-day work at Sunnyside, and have done so now for years; and furthermore I find that work to be full of food for the mind: in fact for the whole of me. I persist because I believe the body has a basic dignity and that therefore the work that the body does has a basic dignity too. I persist because the sharpness of our minds is dependent on the health of the body, and the health of the body is dependent on movement, and household labor is necessarily full of movement. I persist because we are incarnate beings for whom the features of our physical environment and how they match our hearts and how directly they flow from our hands are fundamentally important. I persist because for generations and generations the manifold crafts of kneading the bread dough to make it rise, and hemming up trousers to make them fit, and of gathering herbs for healing, and of engineering children's routines in such a way as to protect their peace and joy, and of planting gardens by the signs, and of preserving their bounty safely: all, all this has been the daily challenge of huge portions of the human race. And do we really want to say all that endeavor is as nothing, at least when compared to a well-paid office job?
I said a fair bit of this to my father and wife and son out in Minnesota last week, in conversation with them about living on less, and I said it again to my friend in the coffee shop here in Valparaiso just a few days later. I say it again here at 9-volt now. I say it because I believe it. I say it for the sake of the healing of humanity. I say it for the sake of the healing of the earth.
HB
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