I Love Housework!!

It's true. Although you probably couldn't guess it looking at the state of my home right now. Cobwebs everywhere. But I love housework!

When I first started doing housework, I lived in a bungalow in Calgary with my parents and my two younger sisters. My mother had a part-time job teaching math at the university and she was an artist. My father was an entomologist who played the piano. A very bohemian household, where the odd cobweb, crumbs behind the African baskets on the kitchen counter, full ashtrays didn't matter much in the bigger scheme of things. But they mattered to me. I cleaned and organized and read books and played the clarinet. Until I discovered rock music and opening the doors of perception, that is.

When I was travelling, I didn't really bother cleaning. Although when I was sleeping in a small makeshift tent in the desert with my husband-to-be, I did try to sweep the sand out in the morning. As a young woman, I lived in many communal houses and did dishes when things got rough.

I've had a home of my own for many years. I've raised five children and kept myself going all these weeks and months, and I've come to value the smell of a well-cleaned, dusted, polished and loved home.

But there's another kind of housework that I do, and that kind is more difficult. It's  the housework we have to do to ourselves. Our inner homes, the ones that we inhabit in our heads and our hearts. This year has been hard, since the fall. I've fallen out with a good friend, consciously. I decided that I could no longer continue with a friendship that I felt was not good for me. Or for her.
I noticed myself falling back into old habits. I had to work around those cobwebs and try to sweep them out. I polished my love, my compassion and my gratitude, so that the light could come through my windows and keep me going on those days when Life is Suffering doesn't seem to make a difference. I moved my inner furniture around, and covered up the scratch on the wall that I kept looking at too often and for too long.

I got rid of some activities that were making me unhappy. I shut some doors, those ones at the back of my inner house that led to resentment, sadness and grief. I opened some other doors, ones that led through a pretty narrow hallway to a sunny room. Armed with natural cleaning products, emotional feather dusters, a large vacuum cleaner and a ton of elbow grease, I cleaned up.