at the receiving end of the firehose of overstimulation that is dominant culture, how do we find the space and stillness to muster a creative response? the imagination may love some noise and colour for a time, but to make our own, many people dearly need quiet. for us, living so intensely at home, homeschooling, homesteading, working from home, a peaceful, restorative space is essential.
in the face of the onslaught of objects and media that flood our world, the sheer profusion of options and decisions can and does overwhelm. taking refuge outside and staying there, if we have a garden or park to escape to, this is a great relief. but at some point, the clutter of a life lived within an economy premised on persuading us loudly to buy more stuff, throw away more stuff, produce more stuff, it must be reckoned with. perhaps that reckoning is a kind of activism all by itself. resistance and reinvention.
being the child of an artist laid my foundation for creating a space one can really think in. being the child of my mother’s near-deafness layered on a critical need for quiet simply to communicate, where too much noise was really TOO MUCH NOISE and sensitivities were acute. in retrospect, i can notice the echoes of a lutheran background, that spareness, the cleanliness next to godliness, expressed often as tidiness and orderliness. my mother’s finnish roots grow deep and there you find minimalism once more, a scandinavian simplicity.
as a youth i rebelled against the simple white walls and pale wood, and lived uproariously in a flat we painted all over (yet, tellingly, my tiny room never could decide and remained white…). when my own children brought noise and colour i came around to the charms of a restricted colour palette, even a pale and monochrome one. it is only much later that i see how patterns and diversity in highly sensitive brains also created the world i grew up in, parented in. the simple, spare space was always meeting needs.
so, with this heritage and in this context i have increasingly begun to make choices that make the space for a creative response, right here at home, in relationship to all the objects of the everyday. if you have seen my films and photographs you already know the tidied version of my tendencies. to find in whites and greys tremendous variation, the emphasis shifting to texture and form, to me is an enormous pleasure. to explore at length the materials of a more handcrafted world, in their unadorned beauty, i could spend a lifetime. this is not really minimalism, how we live, because rather than export all the ways we are supported by life we increasingly bring them home and produce them ourselves, enjoy them, with all their attendant tools and materials and chaos.
so, the dishes are all piled in open shelves, but their shades are pale and muted and they relate to each other with enough unity to become singular, as one, and quiet right down. even stacked to drain on a linen, their simple beauty pleases me and living with them draws out a desire to return to the potter’s wheel to make just a few more particularly needed ones. to serve the food we make upon their blank canvas is a daily pleasure.
now, the food we eat is increasingly made from scratch, straight from the orchards and potagers and hedges and into the pantry to live in glass. this is where colour is wild, and my children like to follow my habit of calming the mad craziness by arranging the shades in gradients. i might be guilty of avoiding the overpowering presence of the written word to a degree that we occasionally have no idea what sort of jam we are about to open (though that may be laziness about finding the grease-pencil to write labels on hot jars on a hot day of preserving).
life does not always allow for scratch-cooking to the degree i am most fond of, but when things are moving relatively smoothly it is a tremendous pleasure to live simply from the brown paper sack of grain to the mill to the bread, the cracker, the cake, without another package, without a label. then the recycling bin grows redundant. buying straight into jars at refilleries is something of an aesthetic holiday to my senses, and the simplicity of setting my own jar back on the shelf, refilled again, provides a deep and absorbing sense of abundance and sufficiency. of enough.
it is the reduction in decisions that i find most quieting to my busy mind. having decided once to limit the palette i wear to a monochrome grey with an exception for that working neutral, indigo, i need not make a thousand decisions that i once faced. in a thrift shop i am efficient particularly in the sort of shop that manages their own systems by gradients. thank you. add brightline rules like favouring natural fibres and classic styles and i know what my choices are immediately. sometimes this means i make do for a great long time, but occasionally the thrifting gods are ever so generous. when i dress each morning, it is not in uniform —oh, i like clothes and their expression and possibility—but the restriction in colour allows great freedom in combination. laundry day can wait a lot longer because everything goes with just about everything anyway. then when i am making my own clothing, the muted tones again simplify my choices, and emphasise variation in texture and shape. i explore them deeply, knitting in cables, plotting my sewing along old traditional shapes and functions.
now, the bathroom in this household is intensively managed by the very nature of a sawdust compost toilet, just as the living room is intensively managed with its wood stove and the kitchen with its sources in gardens and flocks. the utter abundance of material circulating through can be overwhelming. even the greywater from the kitchen, bath and laundry flows into the orchard again, and must be kept in a healthy state, so there is a whole lot going on.
when there is laundry hanging on both pulley airers or there are harvests covering every surface or rainbow lines of books are pulled out and stacked about or the tables are covered in fabrics and sewing things or the handtools start to overflow the toolbox and strew the place with projects and repairs or there’s a chicken or a duck healing in a crate in one corner or a kid goat bottle-feeding in another or the cat drags something in, well! we are glad for the gallery-spareness for so much life to live in.
when the furniture draws back, plain and pale just like a fog beyond us, and the walls are peaceful lime, light and airy, then it is us who are colourful. i have watched my little children grow tall yet unwavering in their response to a cleared table— the moment we tidy up, the making is elicited. soon there are drawings at the round table or baking in the kitchen, and just sweeping the floor and tidying up makes us eager to have a friend round.
if i can lay down my mat before the fire and the room is peaceful, my stillness can join it and run deeper for it as i focus on the pose, the stretch, the breath, and no more.
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in gratitude to you, dear patrons, for your support. this letter is a response to a long-time patron (and fellow scandinavian!) who noticed and adopted some of these patterns to great effect in her own life. i’d love to hear how you find stillness.