A few weeks ago, I came home from a cabin weekend feeling very connected with the natural world and with a sense of stillness. Arriving home, I wanted to lock in that dreamy yet grounded feeling I had, that slow pace of life, so I showered and slowly exfoliated my skin, slowly washed and conditioned my hair, simmered in the water streaming from the showerhead.
When I finished showering and went to get dressed, I meant to put on a thick comfortable clean shirt and a soft pair of shorts. Instead, I was met with a drawer full of crumpled clothing and a keen awareness of tee shirts I'd hoarded from events over the years. It felt like a spell breaking. I sifted through my clothing until I found an oversized tee that was soft from fifteen years of wearing and my thickest pair of knit lounge shorts. And then I went through every item of clothing I had, folding and organizing and making piles of anything I'd hung onto too long, anything that didn't feel like it was making my life a little bit like a fairytale.
Ever since I worked with burlap to cover plants for the winter at a gardening gig a year ago, I haven't stopped thinking about textures. I've been hyperaware of how everything I touch feels between my fingers and toes, how it rests on my skin. I imagine myself on a prairie farm long ago, with nothing but the earth to make what I live in, nothing but the nearest shop's handmade textiles. Textiles. As a child, I read books filled with descriptions about clothing I didn't understand: linens and silks, chiffons and crepes, satins and poplins. I still don't know what some of these feel like, couldn't name them if they were between my fingers.
Our world is made of textures, and it seems like modern manufacturing eliminates a lot of them. Stainless steel and cement smooth the world in a way that lacks contour and attraction of the eye. And mass manufactured products don't hold the same life energy that handmade ones do.
When I sit at my hand-crafted wooden desk, I feel inspired to write. When I touch the plastic of my toiletry bottles...what am I even using? Where do these products come from? When I place tomatoes in a cloth bag from the garden or farmers market, it feels different than picking up a plastic-wrapped package at the grocery store. When I mix brown sugar and coconut oil together in my kitchen, it's different than squeezing brightly colored gel out of a plastic exfoliant tube. Maybe it's in my head, but I don't think so.
There's a vital magic that happens when we curate and care for our space. You've probably felt it, the way it makes your brain work and your body tense when you've let dishes and mail pile up, when the bathtub gets a ring around it, when your drawers are stuffed with random papers and crumpled clothing. When your cabinets are filled with plastic serums and bottles that contain god knows what. When the clothing around your body is thin and cheap.
I'm not advocating for buying products you can't afford or shaming a good bargain. Everyone is in a different place. I am insisting that we all look at our home surroundings with fresh eyes, consider carefully the products we buy, put intention into curating our spaces with only things that we love timelessly, that were crafted or grown with care, that won't be thrown out soon or make us feel anything other than grounded and connected with our bodies and spaces.
I've begun naming what I have by material: ceramic, cotton, wooden, plastic, metal, paper, glass. Woolen, wicker, denim, polyester, flannel. Knowing what materials make up my world has given me a heightened awareness for the craft of the product and the directness of the material from the earth. It has made me choose to part with items that don't belong in the idealized home I strive for and that lack a vital energy.
The great Wendell Berry once wrote, "There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places." The world is sacred, our homes are sacred, our bodies are sacred. Let's use texture as a way to practice reverence and create the holiness of place in our lives.
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