Waking to the Daydream

Holistic Housekeeping Newsletter, April 2025

FOCAL POINT

When Achieving is Valued Over Having, We Can Never Know Ease: On the Wisdom of Cleaning an Already Clean House

Professional house cleaning is by far the hardest job I’ve ever worked in the domestic service industry. For a long time, I had to consume half a weed gummy, a low dose of medicinal mushrooms, and an endless supply of smutty audiobooks just to get through it. It has required all my spiritual fortitude in healthy discipline and purpose, as well as a Sisyphean level of physical stamina.

Some of the homes I worked in were quite extreme, requiring PPE and a lot of sensitivity and kindness–the ability to fully relax into a mess without judgement, to ensure my clients felt cared for by extension of showing care to their home, and trusted my presence in the intimacy of a reality we normally only reveal to closest family.

Because most of my cleaning gigs were ongoing, the novelty wore off quickly and it became as difficult to clean my clients’ homes as it was to clean my own. I had to learn commitment, consistency, and constancy, which does not come easily to me (hello ADHD). I learned how to work with my own brain through establishing a systematic way of approaching the cleaning itself, organizing and curating my supplies, and gentle habit building. I figured out how to microdose novelty when it became unbearably boring, through changes as seemingly mundane as starting with the bathroom instead of the kitchen (routines are meant to be broken, but we have to make them to delight in the break).

It became a powerful meditative practice for me, deepening my presence with the tangible, physical, material plane of reality (a plane I tend to forget, hello adaptive daydreaming), and helping me understand the importance of repetition as a ritual element. I developed the maturity of knowing I do not have to LOVE every part of my income producing work to create meaning, make a difference to others, or find fulfillment in providing for my family.

I also learned a LOT about the mindset of maintenance and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation.

For example–and this will be shocking–I discovered that it’s extremely difficult to feel motivated to show up for your job every week when you are working your ass off and not making enough money to cover basic living expenses. Shocking. I learned how to raise my rates, even though my culture (and sometimes my community members) told me I was overvaluing work that I KNEW was severely undervalued. I did it even though I was scared no one would pay me. I did it even though people yelled at me on Facebook about poor people being unable to afford domestic work–despite being a single mother of two with no child support living off $20,000/year (wtf?).

And I learned how bad it feels when I don’t do my best work and leave someone feeling disappointed–that it feels far worse to disappoint myself than someone else, in fact. That doing my best work matters to me. That my standards belong squarely within the scope of my personal integrity, and cannot even depend on my agreements to someone else so much as my own honor and honesty.

One of my greatest lessons, though, was in the efficiency and delight of cleaning an already clean home. This is a metaphor. Bear with me.

Usually, when you begin a new house cleaning gig, it’s been several months or even years since the home has been properly cleaned. It is common for the first two or three cleanings to take two or three times longer than the maintenance cleanings that follow. After that, it’s relatively easy to maintain the cleanliness of a home.

Cleaning an already clean home not only takes half the time and half the elbow grease, it is a much more enjoyable experience…if you can get over the feeling of “pointlessness,” that is.

I often tell my Holistic Housekeeping clients that believing there is “no point in cleaning the house when it’s just going to get messy again” is like believing there is no point in enjoying the autumn when winter is coming, or there is no point in showering when we will sweat through the bedsheets, or there is no point in eating lunch when we’ll be hungry for dinner five hours later. Tending to any relationship requires ongoing maintenance, and caring for the home is no exception. All living beings are high maintenance, and a home is a being imbued with our life energy. There is less maintenance, but there is no such thing as low maintenance.

Yet our culture deeply struggles with maintenance work, and here is my theory why: ultimately, our society values achieving over having. There is variation within different social locations, of course, especially within different class structures. But in general, we are indoctrinated to believe that ACHIEVING a status marker like owning a home is more indicative of our success than our quality of relationship to our home. This goes beyond mere upkeep, where there can be social pressure to maintain a facade of functionality despite secret dysfunction, or there is often an entanglement between morality and keeping up appearances.

Keeping up appearances is very different from maintaining a relationship or maintaining a state of general wellbeing.

It’s one thing to achieve the status of being married. Lots of people are married. It’s extremely rare for people to be in a long term, functional marriage, though. And even rarer for people to feel content and actively in love in their marriage long term. It’s like equating the wedding with the marriage. These are two entirely different things.

The beautiful thing about maintaining what we have is that it allows us to practice letting things be easy. If we never stop to actually HAVE WHAT WE HAVE and maintain what we have, we can become trapped in insatiability and hardship. Since it’s half the effort to maintain what we have already established as it is to start from ground zero again, it can trick us into believing we can do anything from that steady baseline. So, we are tempted to destabilize ourselves from that point of stability.

We often take on way more than we can rightfully maintain. We overestimate what is possible within the delusion of hyper individuality and the impossibility of nuclear family configuration. Our culture confuses excess with abundance.

This devaluation of maintenance is everywhere. Insight comes rapidly, but we struggle to maintain it. We learn hard lessons over and over and over again, falsely believing that once the lesson has been learned the first time we will never be tempted to repeat a mistake. We forget that anyone who masters anything must be able to return to the beginner's mind over and over again, that if you can’t explain something complex in a way a five-year-old would understand, you cannot claim to understand it at all.

Cleaning an already clean home is not pointless, it’s maintaining foundational care. It is the whole point, in fact, of creating or establishing or having anything at all. Getting into a rhythm of regular maintenance is meant to feel so easy it seems like we’re not doing anything meaningful at all. It is hard to connect with the value of the absence of something; in this case, the absence of the hard labor of falling behind on maintenance.

None of us can perfectly maintain our homes or our relationships, of course. There are human limits, systemic limits, circumstantial limits. There are seasons. But cleaning an already clean home is always worth it, where we can make it happen or pay someone else to make it happen. It is what allows us to have what we have, and keep it going strong.

Photography by Corey Brie of Minivanarchy Photography

INSPIRATION SEEKING

Please/ Let me get old/ Over and over/ Forever

An elderly woman stops me in the self-checkout line of the grocery store to tell me my children are precious. This doesn’t happen as often now that they have reached elementary age, but when they were babies it was as if I had entered Ingles with a globally recognizable celebrity. I was stopped multiple times per outing by multiple parents of grown children and grandparents, always telling me the same thing:

“Cherish every minute, they grow up so fast.”

It became popular when I was a new mother to deconstruct this phenomenon across a generational divide and vent about it on social media; to lament how people have a short memory, they don’t recall the unique exhaustion and hardship of early parenthood, they romanticize what they can’t remember, and this comment is invalidating of the isolation and defeat we feel while we’re raising babies and young children. All of which is true.

And yet.

Despite my own isolation and exhaustion, I had (and still have) a very different experience when old people tell me this. Firstly, because if almost every single parent over 50 is telling me this, it’s probably true. That doesn’t mean I can literally cherish every minute when I’m drowning, or that I’m supposed to pretend parenting isn’t absolute hell sometimes (and yes, there are generational differences here). It means a lot of people with a lot more life experience than me are constantly telling me the same exact thing, and I should listen when I encounter a nearly universal experience in my elders. And now that my oldest child is 10 and we have lived through several close-to-death experiences, I understand.

Part of it is regret. It’s the kind of regret we can only know when we’re old, and we have lived what we cannot ever go back and do differently, and have lived the rewards of hard work that come from long game awareness and effort. In early parenthood, the effort often feels meaningless. For example, it took six months of me telling my first grader to put his shoes on the shelf before he finally, miraculously, out of the blue, put his shoes on the shelf without me asking him to. And this goes far beyond putting shoes away, my god.

Gratitude is not something we can practice in the sense that we feel more of it when we tell ourselves everything in our life we are grateful for (or SHOULD be grateful for), or when we shame ourselves for being unhappy when others have less than we do.

Gratitude is a state of consciousness we access through experiencing loss or knowing we can lose (will lose) what we love.

When old people tell us, “Cherish every minute, they grow up so fast,” they are not telling us that we should perform the happy homemaker, and they are not shaming us for failing to enjoy every part of raising kids. They are telling us to cherish every minute, they grow up so fast. They are telling us that, in hindsight, they cherish every minute. All of it.

Cherish every minute; including the minutes where you feel like you don’t want to be existing in that particularly minute, where it all seems impossible, when you wonder if you ruined your life when you decided to bring children into this world, and you question whether the hardship, fear, and pain is worth loving someone as deeply as you love your children. Cherish the meltdowns, yes. You don’t have to enjoy something all the time to cherish it. Cherish the times you weep at your infant’s hospital bed, praying to ancestors who beat your mother with a belt when she was small. Cherish the days you don’t want to live anymore, but go on living anyway.

It goes by so fast; as we age, time moves differently–quickly. Each year passes faster than the last, we no longer have the luxury of ignoring death, and we do not have all the time in the world. The days are long but the years are short. They will only be four once, once. They will only be five once, once. They will only be six once, once…Every year our child ages we go through a tiny death. We mourn the loss of of who they will never be again, the way our relationship will never be again. They become. We become.

And it was worth it. It is worth it. It will be worth it. Not because our life is the way we imagined it would be, or because our life is what we know it could be if any one thing were different. Not because we secured the outcomes we most desired or avoided the outcomes we most feared. But because, as my friend Hannah Taylor says, MY LOVED ONES ARE THE POINT. Because I endeavor to show my children their care is not a burden to me. This is what it means to cherish something.

HEARTHCRAFT RITUAL

Mirror, Mirror

I have a bad habit of writing important reminders on my entryway mirror. When I check my reflection, my face becomes obscured by my To Do List. It is so symbolic of my struggles with ADHD and over functioning, all I can do is laugh. Laugh, cry, and clean the mirror, that is. Laugh, cry, clean the mirror, and make it a prayer, that is.

The prayer is simple, it goes like this: “May I see myself clearly. May I wipe the mirror clean.”

If you think about magic mirrors in mythologies and fairytales like Narcissus or Snow White, it is clear that these objects represent self-knowledge, wisdom, or a vulnerability to image centric self obsession. In hearthcraft, mundane-sacred objects often have obvious intrinsic meaning like this, even if, technically, meaning is always made up. I love this about hearthcraft. It is decidedly unspecial and accessible, no weird in-group gatekeeping around “sacred, ancient, secret” knowledge is required.

No one makes the rules for hearthcraft. There are no experts. You can’t do it wrong. To make something a ritual, do anything, but do it on purpose. Find the meaning or make the meaning or both. Feel ridiculous while you’re doing it. Question if it’s “real” magic or playing pretend. It doesn’t matter, because when you wipe the To Do List off the looking glass, you see yourself more clearly.

COUPLE COUNSELING

Treat Your Loved Ones Like Strangers

Every time I begin to feel stuck in a dreaded relationship dynamic with my kids or my exes, I try to ask myself, "How would I speak to them right now if they were a stranger? How would I treat them right now if they were a new acquaintance?"

Instantly, I become more present. I become more attuned. I become more curious. I become POLITE.

When a relationship is new, it's delicate. We put our best foot forward and extend effort because we know those early stages establish trust, and because without any history to project, we can easily appreciate the unfolding process of getting to know someone without as many preconceptions of who they are or attachments to how we want them to be preventing us from seeing them clearly.

It's the same with our home. You know that feeling when you first move in? That giddiness and energy that arises with the opportunity for a fresh start? The endless possibilities of spaciousness, simplicity, a blank canvas?

Part of the practice of falling in love all over again is seeing your space with the eyes of a beginner's mind.

HOUSEKEEPING SPELL

"I demand a life that I love." - Amy McNee

What’s Cooking?

I’m writing a book! It will take a long time, but I wanted to tell you about it anyway. It’s called Decluttering is a Grief Ritual. It’s about decluttering, grief, and ritual practice (no kidding)! I will be taking my first ever writing retreat the week of my 35th birthday (April 7th).

I appreciate how much help I've already received. It's hard when we need ongoing support...even though every single human has that need. There are way more worthy causes, people in far greater need, many pressing issues in this world. I also know there is enough support for everyone, and I am connected to people who live the reality of the web of mutually beneficial relationality.

In that spirit, if you have been following me for a long time and would like to Buy Me a Coffee for the week of my writing retreat, it would be a huge support. ☕🫖💻📖

~ Holistic Housekeeping is part of how you can secure your right to enjoy your own life. ~

Some Newsletter Housekeeping

If you subscribed to Adaptive Daydream to receive all of my not-housekeeping content, you can unsubscribe from the Holistic Housekeeping section and still receive everything else!