Across most of my life, I delighted in my own companionship while doing domestic chores. A touch of Cinderella perhaps. While my hands were busy doing menial but meaningful things, my mind was free to wander and wonder. I savored my ridiculous sense of humor. I admired my profound reflections. I smiled in agreement at my astute observations. I pondered my perceptive advice to myself.  That was a time for me to relax with my good friend, Julie, and relish her excellence.   I looked forward to such visits, such as the nightly task of doing dishes. 

In past years, how did I seek a spiritual center? Where did I find a home within myself to experience the sheer pleasure of enjoyment of my thoughts and reflections? I know that a yearning to become a more fully embodied human body started very early.  How did I create time for the expression of this need? 

Perhaps feeling my positive energy while doing dishes and spotting the opportunities it offered to engage with oneself, my son, Dylan, in his formative years, joined me. We chatted while I washed, and he dried. Although he found my dishwashing to require extra work on his part (to wipe away food residues I had missed), he committed to our wash-dry routine for years. To this day, as an adult, he is most likely to call me while doing dishes or preparing a meal. I believe those associations between dishes and dialogue are still in his neural network.    

The phrase ‘time among the trees is never wasted’ rings true.  In my largely domestic life, however, time in the company of my home-based self was not wasted – indeed, I would even say that ‘time washing dirty dishes is not wasted.” I have come to associate the doing of domesticity with the experience of what I would call ‘domestic enlightenment’.  

I, of course, am not the first to recognize potential pleasures derived in the doing of menial tasks. Emily Dickinson is a kindred spirit to those who find not only comfort but also soul stimulation in the mundane. Another quote comes to mind from George F. Will: “It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.” My dream is that each person I meet has sources of humdrum harmony as deep and as moving as my own. I want to become acquainted with those sources of inner delight within a new person I meet – or newly discovered in an old friend. If an ordinary farm in England has been found to be the location of archaic Viking coins, why should I not expect a similar encounter with reserves of inner worth that my friends have unearthed in themselves?   

There is much very necessary focus on domestic violence. Let us put a spotlight as well on domestic enlightenment. It is no less real. It is no less impactful.