Lost Knowledge, Part 1

As I write this the heater just cycled on. I take a sip of blessedly hot coffee. It’s the last morning of Christmas tree enjoyment. The New Year is right around the corner, beckoning like a will-o-the-wisp with promises of shiny new systems, organization, decluttering, and lost weight. I smile knowingly at this entrapping light. The great home overhaul never happens in January, but in pockets, in slow diffusion throughout the year. I won’t be trapped by resolution adrenaline this year. So, I write, enjoy my coffee, and let the sound of the heater fade into the background.

What exactly is Lost Knowledge?

What we as a culture and as women have lost, or actively ejected, is the value of homemaking and the domestic arts.

Side Note: We’ve also lost the knowledge of how to properly raise children and manage a marriage. We’ve lost the truth of both their value and how to do it. But that’s not my focus here. There are plenty of wise older women, pastors, and teachers with solid answers to these questions. That’s not my wheelhouse.

These used to be handed down from woman to woman, mother to daughter. We can sense it when we walk into Grandma’s house, but we don’t know what it is. We are amazed at the home she manages but we don’t know how she manages it. For some of us, we don’t even have our grandmothers as examples. We’re guessing. We guess that some woman somewhere has done this, but maybe not since Ma Ingalls. Some of us had the great blessing of growing up in a home with a dedicated homemaker, but we too are always in a fight against the world’s desire to pry our homes from our calloused hands.

Value

The whole reason I started this blog, this group, read homemaking books all the time, and look for tenders in stories, is to train myself to value homemaking. We have lost not just the what, but the why. Actually, I don’t think we lost it. I think we dragged the value of homemaking into the woods, murdered it, and buried it beside the decomposing bodies of our children.

We are steeped in a culture that actively hates what homemaking brings into the world. The strength, shelter, safety, rest, comradery, health, the never-ending options for production, the love of beauty, and the service a well-managed home can bring to a group of people, the church, and the wider community is powerful. The world doesn’t want us to have that power, they want it for themselves, but they’re not good at it. The world, the state, the government, and corporations don’t shelter well. They don’t manage housekeeping well. They don’t create teams. They create drones. They don’t create beauty. They create creepy, gray, empty worlds. They don’t create health. They poison. They don’t produce. They manage slaves.

We must deliberately recover the value of home. We must buy into the value, nurturing and guarding it. We must see it as our great calling that we pass on to our daughters. We must entice our daughters—our physical and spiritual daughters, physically and spiritually—with our delight in our work. We must learn not to complain but to praise the work before us. We must esteem housekeeping. We must respect our work if we want them to respect our work. How can we say we believe in homemaking and then complain all the time? Believe in what we do, ladies!

This is one of the biggest slices of knowledge that we’ve lost. We must regain it, train it, build each other up in it, speak the truth about it, and feed our minds the worth of home.

Domestic Arts

The domestic arts are the things a home produces. We call them Domestic Arts because they are the enticing outflow of the work of the home. They’re artistic. They require creativity, boundaries, science, and flare. Everything we do in our home is half practical and half beautiful. This is how we romanticize our lives. This is where it comes in. You’re not just doing the laundry. You are harnessing the power of fabric to clothe and beautify yourself and your people. Pies are like stained glass! Bread is splendiferous! Brightly colored vegetables fill our fridges and canned goods line pantry shelves.

Everything that the home produces from clean sheets to holidays, everything we manage, can be resplendent even while serving a practical purpose. This is the work of humble artists. Our work may not last for centuries like the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David, but it is still art. Gardens tended, quilts made, rooms decorated, items lovingly selected, all this tender loving care, makes daily life rich and sweet, but also good and pleasant, restful and kind. The domestic arts may be temporary arts, but they ripple out into all the corners of the world. They build strong families, strong churches, and strong communities. They are our tools and our great endeavors.

We must regain not only the love of the domestic arts, but we must regain the domestic arts as a whole. We must not just tend, but tend well. We must not just be here, but be here with intentional beauty.

Lost knowledge trickles down. We now have to tell young people how to boil water, cook the most basic of food, and that it is practicing good “self-care” to clean your space. I saw an article titled “The Next Step in Self-Care is Cultivating a Cozy Space.” Do I laugh or weep? How is this not just something we teach our kids? Oh, right, the state is raising our kids while we women are off doing something else instead of tending to the magic of cozy spaces. I can’t possibly figure out why we have rampant mental and physical health issues. How surprising and odd.

Some other things that have been lost as we’ve lost the homemaker are:

·         Rest: We have been told we can do it all, so we think we can. But we can’t and we need to stop trying. Not every woman is going to have a farm, passels of kids, homeschool, and have a career. Not every woman can send her kids to public school, work a job, and manage her home well. Humbly, I would suggest that those women are probably not doing any of that well, or they have a lot of extra help, and they probably aren’t resting except when they’re sick or having an emotional and mental breakdown.

·         Crafts: When I owned my own business, I often teased my mom that the skills I used most from my education were the basic ones I learned from arts and crafts: how to cut, glue, and make things look pretty. Our kids need less time on their screens and more crafts. Crafts teach us not only hand-eye coordination but also how to put things together, take them apart, and think outside the box all while being creative and unique. We need less franticness, ladies, and more crafts. More crafts! If you have no hobbies or crafts that you regularly enjoy, you may be going about this work incorrectly. Recreation, construction, production, and sub-creation are all part of being made in the image of God. Look at your life choices and give yourself room to crochet, knit, crossstitch, paint, draw, write poetry, or something! Even make your to-do lists, menus, and labels pretty, funny, and engaging. Why do we not take time for beauty?

·         Cleaning: I’m just going to tell you, I was appalled at the number of kids I hired as part-time help that I had to train how to sweep, and just work at all. Learn how to clean and teach your kids how to clean. Do you think you’re managing your home if it is filthy? I’m not talking about the normal wear and tear of a place filled with kids, pets, husbands, gardens, cooking, and life. I’m talking about vacuums never coming out, mirrors and windows never washed, and bathrooms that never sparkle even for a moment. I’m talking about filth. We must learn to do the basic housekeeping and the deeper housekeeping.

·         Healthcare: women have lost the art of tending to birth and death and all the sickness in between. We don’t know how to care physically or spiritually for those who have a miscarriage. We don’t know how to tend the dying. We have given up those great privileges to the state and insurance companies. We don’t have a working, generational knowledge of how to tend the sick, the young, or the elderly.

We have had generations of women believing the lie that our humble work is valueless, that our shelters are unnecessary, and that the government can tend to our people better than we can. We turned our back on our work and loads of knowledge was lost. Gone. Abandoned. Rejected. We HearthKeepers are trying to regain it. We are relighting candles, pressing clothes, growing flowers, and creating beauty in our pockets of the world. We are learning about herbs, learning to sew, canning food, and decorating. We are waking up to the wide world of home production. And we are working on ourselves, our attitudes, and our understanding. No one can take care of your home and your people like you can if you are invested in the value of what you do and honing your skills. No one. Let’s get to work!