 | |
| What does it mean when the laundry sees its shadow? |
I've been away from the blog for a little too long. Each passing day has felt more overscheduled and underslept than the last. It's become hard to find time to write a post (much less add a few words to my longer projects that languish, or process a rejection thrown in my path this month).
The usual reasons apply: work and kids and household squalor, plus my spouse away all week for training--and we're all thrown off by that; we all miss him. I'm staring at a huge stack of university exams that aren't going to mark themselves, as the saying goes. They always seem manageable in the abstract, and then--well, each one deserves careful consideration, which in the aggregate takes hours and hours. My normal April end-of-term hysteria is blurring into spring term start-up and the urgent need to prepare for a college course on effective teams in the workplace--which I'm teaching, ironically, without a team. Just me. Your correspondent is cranky. I may need a prescription drug of some kind.
But perhaps the bigger problem, buried in busyness, is distress. Our newspapers and screens have been stuffed with serial trauma of late. Consider the failure of the (craven) US Senate to pass the most innocuous form of gun control ever devised; terrorism in Boston and the prospect of terrorism on a Canada-US train route I've taken many a time; brutal war in Syria and other global crises defying enumeration; and yesterday, news of the building collapse in Bangladesh that killed 256 garment workers, according to the latest count. It's happened twice in one year in Bangladesh; last November more than 100 died when a plant that supplied Wal-Mart and Sears burned. These are tragedies, but no accidents (just as the recent explosion in West, Texas was not an accident). They are the result of shoddy conditions in the factories that produce our clothes--yes, ours. I buy from Joe Fresh and other cheap&cheerful stores, just like everyone else.
As consumers, we desperately need strategies to resist capitulation to "the way things are". Boycotts seem like the logical answer--careful, screened buying--and yet boycotts often fail. Information asymmetry is too great for consumers acting on their own to prevail. The marketplace is purposely opaque, the loud, pulsing funhouse of multi-brand promotion obscuring the true identity of those running the carnival. This is too difficult to tackle as individuals. Isn't it?
I have no answers, only questions that pile up. Research that needs to be done.
In the face of all this, it seems trivial to write about daily living, but that's what I'm left with. Control is illusory, but we must attend to our small sphere, our homes and families and communities, as best we can. Carry on with whatever duty of the moment calls, and take our joy whenever and wherever it shows up.
And so, this week I'm acknowledging blessings, and the power of small acts:
--finding a few minutes to start tomato seeds in containers on the windowsill
--maintaining some homemade meals through hectic times despite a distinct slackening in The Unprocessed Project (when a take-out dinner hit the table, my daughter gleefully stage-whispered to her sister, "I think we're giving up")
--kids who make me laugh
--the homecoming of my daughter from university and my husband from his trip, both tomorrow
--the concert another daughter will perform in tomorrow night--a youth-run initiative to raise funds for the Youth Emergency Shelter: massive energy + music + teenaged idealism
--the ability to walk and see the beauty of this landscape
--those exams! (and the fact that I have work, safe work)
--escape into the novel I'm reading (John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead)
--hanging laundry on the line for the first time this spring--and believe me, I never thought I'd be thankful for laundry
--questioning
--life, perpetually messy
What are yours?
No comments:
Post a Comment