A Spiritual Life of One’s Own

As Virginia Woolf noted in her 1929 classic book A Room of One’s Own that women writers require their own money and their own space in order to create, sometimes, being a working woman and  mother, I feel the same about the refinement of a spiritual life.

Despite our advances in gender equality, the reality is, in the United States in 2018 (and in most countries and cultures around the world) women still do the vast majority of the housekeeping and the caretaking of children and our elders--along with our other paid employment outside of the home--and this brings a unique set of challenges to the life of a female Seeker.

Strictly practically speaking, it means there is just less time for a Seeker who is a woman to engage in, and cultivate, her own spiritual life.

Now, on a different day I myself might argue: all aspects of our lives can be part of our spiritual development; from cleaning the toilet in our house to singing a hymn in church.  

And I actually do believe that.

I do.

Each time I am standing in front of a sink piled high with dishes, armed with sponge in hand, I do my darn-dest to invoke Buddhist teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings from his classic book The Miracle of Mindfulness so that no opportunity is missed for spiritual, or mindful, connection.

And yet, what happens when the time it takes to wash all the floors in your house, or the distance you experience while walking back and forth in the back of the church when the baby is crying, causes you to feel more alienated rather than connected with the divine?

When do we as women, need to put the sponge down and give all of our undivided attention to that direct contact with the divine?

As a student of dialectical philosophy, I do not think this is actually an “either-or” -few things in life are.

No, it is more likely (yet again!) about balance, which always feels so out-of-reach.

It reminds me, I recently encountered these two pieces by Chippewa-German American author Louise Erdrich that captures these two vast, and paradoxical, tugs I feel inside of me as a female Seeker.

Always on a spectrum of all or nothing thinking, on the one hand I feel a pull inside of me to just drop everything "housekeeping"- like Ms. Erdrich’s poem “Advice to Myself” from her2003 poetry collection: Original Fire that goes like this:

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

On the other hand, I also have another calling inside of me that lives at  the opposite end of my all or nothing spectrum-of-imbalance who’s essence is encapsulated in another selection by Ms. Erdrich called  “How a Mother Packs” from her 2006 memoir-esque book called Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country that speaks deeply to my desire to mother perfectly.

For a week before I leave on any trip, I am distracted and full of cares. Just at the last minute, I always find myself doing things that I have put off for months, even years. I always change my will, then clean out cabinets and file old letters. I make certain that we all have sufficient underwear, that money and phone numbers are in relevant hands, the dog’s vaccinated for Lyme disease, the manuscript of the last book is in production, the baby has her shots.

…I decide which notebooks to take along. Change the oil in the car. Make sure that my older daughters have postcards and shampoo. I go over plans for housesitting and financial reports and make sure that our bookstore doesn’t need me. There are so many small things. The small things will consume me...

 I tell myself that God and meaning are in the small things as well as the vast. On the other hand, none of this matters at all. The attention to details is just a way to stave off facing the truth. I hate leaving home.

So here I stand.  So imperfectly human.

But balance is rarely ever a 50-50, “Even-Steven” as my grandmother used to say. 

Where life is like a pie chart in which children get exactly this percentage, spouse exactly that percentage, home, work, friends, spiritual life, etc.

And I don’t want it to be that way; I want more moments of fusion and integration, particularly in my spiritual life.  Some might call this The Middle Path.

Yet I’m also realizing, that as a Seeker who is also a working woman and a mother, I do have a need for select times when my spiritual life is filling the vast majority, if not the whole, pie chart. Times when I feel like I have a spiritual life of my own.

On that note, I will close with Ms. Virginia Woolf’s words that come at the very end of her masterpiece, A Room of One’s Own.

If you yourself are a woman, perhaps you too may find worth and worthiness in her advice offered to women almost a century ago.

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young…

Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.

But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her.

For my belief is that if we live another century or so…and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves;…for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.

Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born.

May it be so.