I’ve been reading Shannon Hayes’s newish book Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, and I’m really getting a lot out of the related thinking/reflection on lifestyle choices it inspires. Hayes interviewed quite a few people in rural-to-urban situations about how they are creating their lives (less spending, making doing) and the book includes many of their stories and a lot of interesting history about homemaking before the word became so loaded. It’s both an inspiring and challenging read; highly recommend.
As a person deeply involved in creative fields, though ones more focused on paper and performance, I struggle to make space for the private, family-based creative acts that go into homemaking. However, even though such work often gets short shrift in contemporary society–spend more time at the office and let stops at Olive Garden and Target do the rest!–a homemade life is always where I find the most emotionally satisfying creative opportunities. But I’m also coming to understand that that’s also where I can find equally intense intellectual satisfaction. Like anything, house work can be mindless (cleaning probably always kinda is), but it will be what you put into it. I’m not about to go freegan or anything, I don’t think, but I am going to be on the lookout for a wider variety of home-based creative opportunities and see how it feels to shift a bit more of my creative focus from public pursuits to private ones.
I wonder if professional artists (in the big definition of artist sense) these days, faced with the pressures of time and opportunity and the siren song of their Facebook pages, feel the need to skip investing in their personal creative lives in order to put enough time into meeting their career aims. Is it an element out of balance? What impact might changing that up have on the lives and work of artists and the local communities they inhabit?
*Bread recipe from 101 Cookbooks. And who could say no to rainbow juice? (Clearly, I have no children.)
While certainly different, surprisingly I find that my creative home life can be just as stimulating and rewarding as my composing/performing life. Last summer I wrote about the domestic creative joys of designing and building a fence/gate and refinishing/painting our front door. Both were physical as well as intellectual and creative challenges, equal to coming up with that great chord progression or emotionally resonant musical moment. And it is definitely a struggle to balance the day-to-day demands of email/Twitter/Facebook (like the weeds in our garden, paying some attend to culling, will keep everything from overrunning) with trying to create not just a place to live, but rather a home: a place that is deep, meaningful, and enriching on its own. I think with all of the contemporary emphasis on being aware of what you eat (the Slow Food movement or Michael Pollan’s ideas) or how one lives with respect to one’s self and surroundings, people are starting to realize that they can create a connection to well-being and satisfaction by living what I call an ‘elegant life’. And of course, this all translates to deep and meaningful artistic output as well.
Thanks Molly, I didn’t know the Hayes book but I’ll add it to my (growing!) summer reading list.
Molly adds: Thanks, Joe. ‘elegant life’…I quite like that.
For me, the ultimate “home-based creative opportunity” presented itself on 6/22/99. All my professional artist friends (all of whom are in fact professional artists) told me it would take my work to levels previously unimagined. I didn’t believe a word of it, but my goodness they were right. Elegant it is not, but if you suspect that a real-time object lesson in reality, the nature of grace & life’s big questions might feed your muse, jump in with both feet.
And a good recipe for Rainbow Juice is only gonna help.
Is it too much to read this and shout “hallelujah!”?
I am desperate for more flower arranging, gardening, candle-making, jam-making. More make, less consume. More create, less achieve.
Yes, yes, yes.
Molly replies: Not at all!!…How else can you be heard over the roar of modern life? Support in this is essential, I think. We all need to rally together. And that thing about people on their death beds not lamenting that they didn’t spend more time at the office? Personally, I think I need that tattooed somewhere.