The Home Economics of Soul

"Sweet Pea"
A 550-square-foot houseboat in
Olympia, Washington

 

 

Jean Lall, an astrologer and therapist from Baltimore, lectures on the soul of housework. She calls housework 'a path of contemplation' and says that if we denigrate the work that is to be done around the house every day, from cooking to doing laundry, we lose our attachment to our immediate world. There is also a close relationship, she says, between daily work and the house and responsibility to our natural environment.


"I might put it this way: there are gods of the house, and our daily work is a way of acknowledging these home spirits that are so important to sustaining our lives. To them, a scrub brush is a sacramental object, and when we use this implement with care we are giving something to the soul. In this sense, cleaning the bathroom is a form of therapy because there is a correspondence between the actual room and a certain chamber of the heart. The bathroom that appears in our dreams is both the room in our house and poetic object that describes a space in the soul.


"I don’t mean to inflate the simple things of life with exaggerated meaning and formality, but we might be reminded of the value to the soul of doing our daily chores attentively and with an eye to detail. We all know that at some level daily work affects character and the overall quality of life, but we usually overlook the way soulfulness can adhere to ordinary housework and the gifts it can bring to the soul.


If we let other people do our ordinary work for us, or if we do it ourselves without care, we might be losing something irreplaceable and eventually experience that missing element as a painful sense of loneliness or homelessness". ~ Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul