Quotidian Rhythms

Quotidian: "occurring every day; belonging to every day; commonplace, ordinary"

Today, while visiting a friend I was reminded of a few thoughts from Kathleen Norris' writings.  My friend was hanging clothes out on a clothesline in the sunshine and warm breeze - a sight one seldom sees these days. While she thought she should stop and set this aside until later we encouraged her to continue and as she did so, I took a few photos thinking that when she came to gather them later she will experience smells and warmth that signal a job well done - victory.

Kathleen Norris in her book Dakota, A Spiritual Geography, under the heading "Weather Report: June 30" writes the following:

" I get started early, before six.  It promises to be a good laundry day: a steady wind but not too strong. I come by my love of laundry honestly: my earliest memory is of my mother pulling clothes in from the sky on a line that ran out our apartment window in Washington, D.C.

Hanging up wet clothes while it is still cool, I think of her. Though she's lived in Honolulu for more than thirty years, she's a plainswoman at heart; her backyard clothesline is a dead giveaway. The challenge of drying clothes in a tropical valley agrees with her; mountain rains sweep down at least once a day, and she must be vigilant.

Here [Lemmon, South Dakota] no rain is likely, unless, as so often happens, our most beautiful summer days turn dark and violent in late afternoon, thunderstorms pelting us with rain or hail.  I think of a friend who was dying, who had saved up all her laundry for my visit.  "I can't trust my husband with it," she whispered conspiratorially. "Men don't understand that clothes must be hung on a line."

She was right.  Hanging up wet clothes gives me time alone under the sky to think, to grieve, and gathering the clean clothes in, smelling the sunlight on them, is victory."


In her, "The Quotidian Mysteries - Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work" [1998 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality] Kathleen Norris says,

"We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were. We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places - out of Galilee, as it were - and not in spectacular events..."  She goes on to say of her sister who goes through the daily routine of mothering,  "She has grown adept at recognizing and savoring the holy in the mundane circumstances of daily life.  Finding spiritual refreshment in unlikely places, she can offer nourishment to her children."

Now, I wouldn't say that I have found this to be absolutely true in my case but I have caught glimpses of it because somehow I also believe that things seen and things unseen are intertwined.  Nora Gallagher writes that "the road to the sacred is paved with the ordinary" and in following her daily liturgical readings she concludes, "My daily calendar reminds me that what I experience in the world of faith must be measured against what I see, what is happening around me."

These writers remind me that even though my world may seem fragmented into the sacred and secular more often it is as "if each world challenged and sanctified the other" [Gallagher] and in reality, I long to live as a whole person - complete, with an inner and outer harmony.  In peace. Shalom.