Shelter for the Spirit
Create Your Own Haven in a Hectic World.
Featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show with a Foreword by Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul.
Americans spend billions each year on houses, furniture, appliances and interior decoration, but many homes have become little more than drop-off zones where we collapse after work. I learned during ten years as a single mom that home needs to be a haven where people can revitalize mind, body and soul.
In Shelter for the Spirit, I've attempted to merge Eastern and Western spiritual traditions with a sensitivity to the demands of modern life. In it, I help you rid your home of clutter and decorate in ways that reflect your personality; celebrate special days (and ordinary ones, too); and transform any house or apartment into a home for your soul.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Thomas Moore
Introduction
1. A Loving Foundation
2. Making a Home
3. Simplifying
4. Cooking
5. Cleaning
6. Celebrating
7. Sitting
8. Comforts
Afterword
Appendix A: Home Birth
Appendix B: Homeschooling
Appendix C: Home Business
Appendix D: The Final Passage
Read a Chapter - Introduction (abridged).
Human beings need a place to foster an inner life. Shelter for the Spirit is about creating such a place from a house or apartment that used to be only a Tudor or a brownstone. It is about reclaiming home as the primary center for our spirituality, our resourcefulness, and the majority of the best moments of our lives. It is a guide to discovering sacred space in the midst of the ordinary, and to realizing that the ordinary has been extraordinary all along.
Home is so fundamental we tend to overlook the degree to which it affects our work, our well-being, and our overall effectiveness. When we are able to consciously experience and appreciate life at home and make changes there to enhance it when we can, we reap the benefits both when we're home and when we're not. Cleaning out a closet, eating in a little more often, snatching a few minutes alone in the morning to sit with our private plans and thoughts and feelings - such small but specific actions increase the beauty, satisfaction, and peace of mind we experience.
If you're like me, you feel more in control of your life when your house is in order. You probably feel happier when objects of sentimental or aesthetic appeal populate your environment. When you have a place where friends easily congregate, you feel supported. When you know that there is some square footage in the universe set aside for you to be comfortable, creative, and leave a legacy with your name on it, you feel secure.
I've learned what it takes for me to be happy at home from the places I've lived - the London bed-sitter I rented at eighteen, modern complex apartments with balconies and trash compactors, and fine houses in their dotage with old wood and lead glass and gas lines behind the ceiling fixtures. I've learned by being home a lot, as a home-schooling mother and a writer working at home, as well as by traveling for long stretches and needing to bring a sense of home along on the journeys. I've also learned by observing the homes of others.
As a child, I did a lot of visiting. There were the suburban ranches of my mother's half-dozen siblings, the cool stone and mahogany bungalows of my elderly nanny's seemingly ancient friends, and the tiny tenement flats where I accompanied my father, a doctor, on house calls. The patients who lived there didn't have the money for a hospital stay, but some of them avoided hospitals on principle. "Those are just places to die," I remember hearing from a tiny old woman who had once met Charles Lindbergh and could name the books of the Bible in order. "If the Lord wants to take me, He can come and get me right here where I live."
Unconsciously, I began to read those houses and apartments the way a palmist would read the lines on a hand. Each dwelling revealed the character of its inhabitants well beyond their financial status or their taste in furniture. Each one had a personality. Sometimes the simplest were the best: They tended to have the most dogs and the most cookies.
Since then, I've learned that anyone claiming four walls and a roof can create a physical environment that is spiritually sustaining. It isn't enough to have a place that keeps us warm and shows our friends that we have taste or can afford a decorator. We want a home like English author Robert Southey described as "a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never known beyond its hallowed limits," the kind of home where we can relax, create, be with those we love the most, and be alone with ourselves. We want a place where we can process the events of life as a whole, a place where we feel valued, useful, and protected.
So we turn the key in the lock, open the door, and the dog has made so much confetti out of Kleenex that the bedroom floor resembles Times Square on New Year's morning... the bathtub faucet is leaking again, and the plumber who fixed it six weeks ago says the warranty was only good for thirty days... fresh vegetables age in the crisper, but there's a meeting tonight, and one of the kids has soccer practice. Dinner will come from the microwave or Taco Bell. The "mystic circle" looks more like a double knot.
Shelter for the Spirit is an instruction manual for untying that knot. Every home can be a haven, if not always a heaven. Homes are spiritual entities. They do more than simply house us. Collectively, they define what our neighborhoods and communities look like. Their care of lack of care creates areas of beauty or decay. The people who are nurtured (nor not nurtured) within them go out to contribute to the world (or detract from it)...
In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore writes, "The soul prospers in an environment that is concrete, particular, and vernacular. It feeds on the details of life, on its variety, its quirks, and its idiosyncrasies." You honor your home when you relish these particulars and allow them to support your growth. The building you live in is inanimate in one sense, but every atom within it is pulsating with life. It has its own story in which you and the people you live with are characters, just as the structure is a silent character in your biography. You provide the opportunity for life to continue in this place. It in turn gives you a place to cultivate your soul - and do the laundry.