Quotidian: occurring every day; belonging to every day; commonplace, ordinary. (Merriam-Webster Third New International Dictionary)
Mine is a very ordinary, everyday life. I have a husband and four children. I teach biology to community college students. I do a lot of cooking and laundry and gardening. I occasionally (far too occasionally) vacuum, mop and declutter. I knit.
In her sublime little book, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work,” writer and poet Kathleen Norris explores the way daily tasks can become worship and opportunities to experience the presence of the Lord.
She writes, ” Laundry, liturgy and women’s work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks…do not define who we are as women or as human beings. But they have a considerable spiritual import… and their significance for Christian theology is not often appreciated. But it is daily tasks, daily acts of love and worship that serve to remind us that religion is not strictly an intellectual pursuit… Christian faith is a way of life, …not a grocery list of beliefs. The Christian religion asks us to place our trust not in ideas… not in ideologies, but in a God who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and who desires to be present to us in our everyday circumstances. And because we are human, it is in the realm of the daily and the mundane that we must find our way to God.
That’s where my life is at – lots of everyday responsibilities and chores with my young family – and many joys, to be sure – but not so much free time or time for contemplation. Knitting gives me contemplation time, even when I’m knitting at soccer practice or the dentist’s office. Time to listen to the still, small voice. Time to blunder my way to God.
The poet William Stafford once said that he never suffered from writer’s block because when he found himself unable to write, he simply lowered his standards. In this blog, I write about my knitting and my quotidian life. Sometimes my standards are pretty low, but I thank you for visiting.
