Homemaking, one bite at a time.

Homemade Challah

For months now, I have been going through a transformation, here at home.  With the help of a group of wonderfully supportive fellow Facebookers, I have been taking small steps in my life, to declutter, simplify, and focus on what is really important.  When we started, we had a lot of common goals.

Most of the goals started out in the arena of what we wanted less of.  Less clutter.  Less stress.  Less money trouble.  Less junk in our way, messing up our homes.  Less keeping up with the Joneses.  But as we talked, we also discovered what it was we wanted instead.  Clean, peaceful homes, filled with mindfully chosen useful and beautiful things.  Lives lived in contentment, within our means, with time for the things that are really important, and that set good examples for our kids.  More gardening, baking, sharing, crafting, and beauty.  More connection to others, and to the earth.

Those were our ideals, and they were lofty.  They left us with that daunting question: How do we get there from here?

Well, how do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.

We began encouraging each other through weekly challenges.  Though some of the challenges hinted at the ideals we were longing to live out, the majority smacked of the mundane and the repetitive.  Keep a clear counter.  Track your spending.  Take the too-small clothes out our your kids' dressers.  Start a laundry routine you can stick to.  Make a nice dinner for your family.

They were good challenges in that they were things we needed to improve at.  But they seemed like such surface things.  We were craving something more visceral, more enlightened, and yet, it seemed almost impossible to get away from some basic connection between simple living and being clean and organized.

From The Complete Tightwad Gazette:
 

"I have had this same experience on several occasions: I visit the home of someone on a small income, frequently a senior citizen. The home is tidy, orderly, and inviting. I like being there.

Maybe the hostess asks me to get the milk. Only then I notice that the refrigerator is of a vintage bordering on antique. The paint has worn through near the handle from decades of openings. But the refrigerator is also lacking in fingerprints and the litter of shopping lists and phone messages adhered with cute magnets and clear tape. [...]

A further tour throughout the home would reveal a similar pattern. Furniture might be mismatched by good looking. Woodwork might need to be repainted, but it is clean. Nothing is brand new, but somehow the entire home has an appeal.

Where we live has a marked effect on our sense of well being. If we are happy in our home we have less need to leave it and spend money."

As we go along, it is becoming clear how the simple, somewhat monotonous tasks of homemaking really make up the stuff of life. If they are going smoothly, we have space for creativity, deeper spirituality, real human connection. But if they are a mess, we just feel harried and inadequate.

"Consider this: if your home is not providing you with a place of peace and calm, of focus and motivation; if your home is instead a major source of stress and anxiety in your life, then isn't it obvious that things are seriously out of balance? [...] How you live in the home -- eat, breathe, sleep, play, and connect with loved ones -- should be the antidote to stress, not the cause."
~Peter Walsh, author and organizer extraordinaire

Elevating the importance of peaceful home life seems to be at the heart of the simplicity movement. It isn't about keeping things clean for the sake of appearances, or even worse, to compete with Jane down the road.  Rather, it seems to be about realizing that if we can learn to keep comfortable homes, our families will want to be in those homes, and that will support our larger goals of cultivating an attached and connected family.

Kim John Payne, Waldorf educator and author of the book, Simplicity Parenting, has this to say about the link between simplifying and strong families:

"While our love may always be there, our attention can suffer, our connection can sometimes falter, and when this happens, understanding [our children] can seem like a whole lot of work. Our instincts are not always strong. Simplification is about stripping away the distractions and clutter that monopolize our attention and threaten our connection."

As a group, we are certainly finding this to be the case.  One member came on to post in celebration that she was so caught up with cooking and cleaning that she had extra time to devote to playing  farm animal dominoes and candy land with the kids.

Hubs, playing guitar for the kids, after bath time.

For myself, because I have been caught up with the house, I have been baking more. My husband has had the space in the evenings to sit in the living room and play guitar. I have cleared off my craft desk, and have begun creating again. My son can go downstairs, find a clear space to play, and build something out of LEGO.  Friends and family can drop in unexpectedly for lunch or tea, and I have a place for them, and food to feed them.  I can offer to share things with others, and there is space to walk into my storage room and find the things I am looking for.

My clean home is empowering us to be more present, creative, productive, and generous.  It has been the best kind of surprising.

Image credit to Soulseeds: Daily Affirmations