Begin with the Laundry

Jane Fonda, said recently,
“I feel a presence, a reverence humming within me
that was, and is,
difficult to articulate.”

Everything happens when you meditate. Whole worlds are dismantled...
the entire universe
settles at rest.
- Karen Maezen Miller

“Why don’t you leave?” I asked my husband one day after work. It was not an unusual day. Nothing had been said. Nothing had happened. It was a day like any other that I’d hauled across the wide river of my discontent. He left. It wasn’t quite the end, but it was the beginning of the end of something that was already over. After a few squalls about money and other things that stand for money — rights, obligations, fairness, and furniture — the divorce was done. But the undoing wasn’t.

A few months after my husband left, I started to worry that the problem might not have been my husband. I took a lover and fell quickly overboard. After that lover left, and the lover after that, I started to worry that the problem might not have been the lover. I sold my business. After the business sold, I started to worry that the problem might not have been the business. I left the house, and after I left, I started to worry that the problem might not have been the house. In the attic that last day, kneeling over a bag of stale and wrinkled recollections, I had a hint of what I had been missing. Laundry. And not just laundry, but what laundry gives us: an honest encounter with ourselves before we’re freshened and fluffed and sanitized. Before we have ourselves put together again.

Do your own laundry, and the tag inside will tell you exactly how to care for what you hold in your hands. Every bit of life comes with instructions when we are attentive enough to notice, and on the high bluff of my prime I hadn’t yet opened my eyes. I gave that sack of old clothes away, but soon, and every day after, I took back a bit more of the load I had long foisted on someone else. I took back responsibility for myself, my relationships, my work, my days, my nights, my joy, my love, my pain, my happiness. I took on the washing, drying, and folding that constitute an authentic life.

I began to excavate what all the ancients, and my own spiritual forebears, tell us we can find at the very bottom of the basket, beneath our rumpled, stained, and worn-out lives. I went looking for a change of clothes, and I found the path to clear wisdom, compassion, and enlightenment. Bit by bit, I reassembled the remnants of my discarded life and made myself happy and whole. I can tell you how. It begins with the laundry, and it leads everywhere you never thought you’d go.”

~ Karen Maezen Miller, Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life

Take this blink of time when you are still stumbling...
to tumble freely in a
state of grace
~Karen Maezen Miller