Rainy July

Though my summer days have been busy galavanting around visiting friends and family, practicing dance, doing school, and making memories with B, my big summer project has been attending to the house. I've rearranged my study once again and deep cleaned the master bed/bathroom—the first time that's been done since we moved in well over a year ago! Also, I've been slowly attacking areas of the kitchen and living room, but most of those spaces need much more attention. 

One motivating factor has been more healthy living, really integrating our yoga practice into how we move and live in the house. This morning I rediscovered a book that B and I had bought for our first anniversary for making one's house more natural. It's called The New Natural House Book, by David Pearson. It's designed for those looking to build, as well as for those of us who already own or rent a structure. He combines advice/ideas/choices that attend to design, environmental concerns, and health while recognizing that sometimes the three issues conflict with one another. 

Something I've been doing, or wanting to do already, is what he calls "intermediate spaces," such as porches and verandas. The idea is to integrate spaces around and inside your home so that changes in spaces are less abrupt, with more flow for us yoginis. I think this is pretty difficult to do in a traditionally-built, boxed American home or apartment with very distinct rooms.  However, I want to try this with our long living room and kitchen by moving the larger dining table into the area of the living room closest to the doorway to the kitchen. We have a lot of unused space in the living room and the kitchen often feels a bit crowed to me. 

As an aside, I watched Fight Clue again the other day (inspired by Stuff White People Like) and, though I've always enjoyed this film and its counter-culture nature, I think that like the website mentioned above, ultimately the film is critical of an extreme, hyper-masculine counter-culture movement. Perhaps that's obvious to some, but was not what I noticed about the film the first few times I watched it. Sure, we like Brad Pitt's character, his tough-guy, anti-sissy posturing, but his method for solving the problems we have in this modern world are absurd, blowing up buildings and having fight clubs. There was no middle ground, no way, but just destruction as corrosive as the unfettered capitalism it justifiably criticizes. In fact, the leading character's cultural critique, while funny, is not a particularly deep or nuanced. Basically he says "We're out of touch with our bodies so lets beat each other up to get back in to our bodies." Well, I realize it's all just a movie, but there are other ways of getting back in touch with our bodies as Norton's character discovers by going to the self-help groups in the beginning. 

Anyway, I'm just reminded of all this, of being mindful, while I go about pattering with the design and flow of the house. As I've said before, our things are us, to a degree. They make up a certain kind of body, an exo-skeleton, and I think it is important that we pay a certain amount of attention to that outer shell. Sure it's all been commodified, but you have to live in the world you're in, and work with what you've got. Sometimes commodities are helpful, sometimes harmful. The key is knowing when you're doing the choosing of your things or being chosen by them.