Friday 22 June 2007

Staying In on Solstice Day

Yesterday during the day Safiya and I stayed in to listen to the wind, to lounge under the lilac trees and watch the laundry fly in the breeze, to read books and snuggle with faces in the shade, toes in the sun...

Both Mr. S. and I are homebodies at heart, and I think Safiya has inherited this. She very often responds to news about going anywhere with "but I want to stay home!". We're lucky because this has made downshifting easier and comfortable for us, although sometimes the temptation to do something does raise its harried head. But we moved to this house to live in it, presumably....something that I think is forgotten in our culture. (Why are laundry rooms always tiny with no windows?) Our homes are for living, and that includes living with our children.

At lot of the time it is not we who have built our homes, and maybe this doesn't sit well. Finding a place that feels comfortable is worth its weight in gold, and very often people will spend as much decorating over problems without really trying to figure out what is it about the bones of the place that makes them fill ill at ease. More stuff doesn't fix it, and so they get other stuff.....And the decorating magazines, much like the fashion magazines, make us feel inadequate and offer up more stuff as the solution.

Or we end up shuttling our children around all day, trying to keep them entertained, escaping from our four walls (although living in Canada, I get cold-weather-cabin-fever just as bad as anybody in the middle of January). What are we escaping from? If we are out, does that make us more useful? Maybe we simulate going to work, because that is what is valued in our society. Must stay busy, must get things done. And we drag our children along or warehouse them for the day...

When we lived in the condo, I felt in my bones what was wrong (and it wasn't anything we could change!). The seventh floor, sun only from the west, and walking out to the desert of downtown with no respite was not right for a downtown mama with a farmgirl heart (and a geek alter-ego, I might add, although that's not part of the story now, is it?). I started reading Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, and it really hit...home. The idea that place and people are integral to eachother is very dear to my heart. We were lucky to find this place, this home, even with its imperfections and trials.

If only for sitting under the lilac trees on a summer solstice day....

Hope these words find you in a place you love....

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