" I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
He, in the middle of the 19th century is faced with the ever and vastly changing modern world. Trains, Science, and Industrialization is changing the face of the world. He chooses to, in the words of Robert Frost, to take the 'road less travelled'.
I, on some level, have left that bustling modern world behind; only my Walden is the Home. The lapping shores of the pond is the rhythmic music of the laundry. The streams and valleys to traverse and contemplate in fields, are my rooms in my home. The dinning room, laid out quiet and waiting, the flowers set in their moment of peak bloom upon the freshly ironed linen, the plates solitary and quite awaiting the voices of guests. These are my birdsong. My open field. My quiet yet turbulent nature.
Am I living a modern Walden? Has the domesticity of the home become as fleeting and likely to disapear as the beauty and quiet of nature in the fastly changing industrial revolution of Thoroueas time? Walden was published almost exactly 100 years before my experiment (1854). What will be the Walden of 2055?
"This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain-storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the wood thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore."
Though I have a small man made pond in my yard and I live walking distance to a salt marsh and but 2 miles from the seashore, my neighbor is not these waters, though they have often called and consoled me. My POND is my home. My neighbor, when there has been none, has become my house. Which, for my loving it, has started to become my Home.
I have felt a return embrace from my home. I have listened, quiet as the washer spins or the water whistles in the kettle, to its song. There has been a hush when I am alone and the house is quiet, save the movements of my dogs upon the little sofa in my sitting room, or the crick cracking of seeds from my parakeet. When I have stopped, sweated from the fury of the clean, in the midst of my kitchen, the heart of my home, I have seen it's glisten on the countertop, the shine of its floor as the calm of the water. The smile back from this neighbor, this friend, this child and parent rolled into one, this building: This HOME, has sated me.
Others may and will scoff at such a statement. They might say that the folded ironed linen is the shackles which bind me. That the broom and dust pan, the signs of my submission, but I say to that: these are not shackles but the bird song and fresh smell of Thoreua's nature. They are not a prison but a new kind of freedom of the home. The freedom Thoreau had in leaving his society, stepping outside of his present day norm of the vastly changing modern world into the open air is no different from my own. His separation from his now was not bondage but freedom. He made a choice to return to the 'old ways'.
I am sorry if I am waxing so poetic this post, but these days of contemplation have really got me to find a new level in my housewifery. I was not able to blindly dash through the house in some great struggle, "the war against the dust and the grease", which I had here-to-fore considered it. I was wrong. I am not in battle with my house, I am in sync with it! Having chopped at the forest and hacked at the ground I have stopped and listened to it. The quiet. The organic movement of it. There is dirt and animals and smells and sounds in this house. It has lived for my being in it and on its own. I am no longer attacking it daily with my sword of broom and vacuum, forcing it to wear the clothes I pick for it that day, but stopping and listening. It is funny how so often just stopping and doing nothing, the mere cessation of an act, often brings such clarity such realizations.
My illness and subsequent 'giving in' to what I had percieved as the enemey: my house and it's encroaching dirt, I have become to see as my ally. It has embraced me. When I allowed my eye to wander from the dust bunnies under the sofa and the crumbs on the kitchen floor to the window sill where the sun lay warm and dappled. The unpainted fence in the front was no longer taunting me for its not having been yet painted, but its beauty of weathered wood and the dance it was making with the dry crips brown embrace of the Clematis and Hydrangea. It held me and my dogs in a quiet embrace on the sofa as I read. It gave me the entertainment of the snow falling through its glass eyes and protected me from the wind and rain that followed, holding me in its bed and warmth of covers.
I urge any of you homemakers to take this advice: Just stop for a moment. Put down that broom, set aside that rag, turn off that tv and listen. Find a spot in your house and listen to it. Let go of the dust bunnies and the impending meals and piling laundry and listen. Can you hear that? It is the sound of your closest friend. The pal that is alwasy with you. Yes, sometimes it is a naughty child, hiding dust in all its crevices and that sock that you were sure had a mate in the laundry, but its rebellion is your voice too. You help to make and shape it, much as a mother does a child, and we love a child even when it is naughty. Even if your dwelling is not your own and if it is a one room flat, it is your home. It can be your home. The outter layer of your thoughts, hopes and dreams. Only, don't pin too much on it. Give it a break. The pair of you can rest and listen together. There is plenty of time to brush and spit polish it to be ready in its sunday best, but leave it off for now and sit and listen to your 'neighbor' your silent friend, your Home.
"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography."
In Walden there is a quote I think most pertinent to those who made up that time of the post war ear. We may yearn for it, wax nostalgic or hate and dispise it, whatever opinion we have of those in the mid twentieth century, we have to acknowledge that they took nothing and made something. They saw hope when hope had been lost. Their world, their youth and childhood, had been bleak, their families had been touched by death in so many ways. Wants and needs became like companions to them, as they were so often with them. This quote sums them up for me and also is the best advice for anyone living anywhere in ANY time:
"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names."
And though the 1950s is so often painted as a time of conformity, you have to realize at the time it was not conformity. It was a break from the past. The ideas, the art, the architecture, even civil rights were all born out of this time. They had to work at it each day to change and make a new world. It was not perfect, but is anything of real beauty ever perfect? Is not the failings what we learn from and make a better way?
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
I think these famous words of Rober Frost are fitting here. I am sorry if this post contains no photos nor recipes nor specific facts, but I think these realizations are as true to 1955 as to 2009 and 2055.
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference"
I am not sure where this road is leading me, but I am glad that I have taken it. I am glad to be honored to meet those of you who I have along the way and I hope to meet more. Thank you for coming along on my journey.
