Hearth-Keeping

Keeping the hearth is a spiritual practice, and a wonderful balance to the activist work I do. The important practices related to caretaking, community building, and tending of hearth and home are often undervalued, and we hearth-keepers often work quietly behind the scenes.

"That fire that burns in the center of collective identity and lineage and culture is the mythic hearth, and those who protect, embody, and maintain that center for the community are our hearth-keepers. ... We simply wouldn’t have a sense of identity or belonging without the essential work of hearth-keepers, the essential mysteries of the hearth itself, and the love and oversight of those deities whose central mysteries are the hearth." ~Riverdevora, The Revolutionary Art of Hearth-Keeping

Agenda:

1. Root reading
2. Deep kitchen cleaning

3. Home sensations

4. Pockets

1. Root reading:

I'm reading again from "Root and Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self," by Becca Piastrelli (2021). I started this book last December, then got distracted. Today I'm on Chapter 3: Making a Sacred Home.

Becca says, "No matter where you live, your home sits upon land, upon earth. ... It can be a challenge to remember the earth element within our homes."

She talks about tending your home and land with deep care and intention, because they are your kin, and relearning the ancestral ways of caring for a home: Hanging herbs to dry, sweeping to bring blessings in, and filling the home with delicious scents, sounds, textures, and tastes.

2. Deep kitchen cleaning

As I said last week, I rotate through the rooms of my house with a different focus each week. I've defined four zones so I complete (theoretically) the whole house in a month. But it only works if I NEVER skip the cleaning, because it will be a whole month before I get back to that room! Since I've been skipping too often over the summer, this month I'm cleaning a little deeper in each room.

This week is Kitchen and Laundry Room week, and yesterday I cleaned and mopped the floors in both rooms. Today is dusting day! My routine for dusting is to: 

1. Go quickly through the whole house with a long duster to remove cobwebs from room corners, and dust from the tops of picture frames.
2. Next, dust the furniture in one zone : Take everything off the surface, spray and wipe, then return everything neatly.

One dust-reducing tip I always forget is to clean the air filters on our heat ducts regularly, every 8 to 12 weeks. To clean, open the front panel, remove the filter, take it outside and give it a spray wash with the garden hose, carefully shake dry, and reinsert.

I plan to clean completely, and without urgency, this week so that the kitchen glows. When I slow down and pay close attention to the tasks I am doing - take time to fold a shirt nicely, and move furniture to sweep in the corners - I touch on the Zen of housecleaning, and create spaces that are peaceful and also energizing.

3. Home sensations:

September overflows with textures, colors, and scents; I'll find ways to fill my home with them, and give attention to rich details. Some ideas:

• An end-of-summer nature tray. 

• Sage and rosemary hanging to dry.
• Bake bread and make soup.
• Shop for one beautiful, new kitchen item: A tablecloth, bowl, new candles, or plant.
• Collect acorns in a glass jar with grandson #1.
• Create a new fort hang-out space under the kitchen table.

4. Pockets:

It's Back-to-School time, and our oldest grandson has started a new pre-school routine. We will pick him up 4 days each week, at noon. It's really quite a big deal.

To celebrate the transition, we are using our pocket calendar - a hanging with 7 large embroidered pockets that my mom made for us, when our children were young. (The pockets have not been out since the summer solstice, yet they are so high in my grandson's mind that his first words on arriving each day are, "Grandma, pockets?") 

We put a little surprise in one pocket each day, usually with an associated activity: Today, a package of peanut butter cookie mix (and a gorilla)!