Dirtwoman - the Final Resignation

In the house where I live, I am Dirtwoman. To be fair to him, for a long time my beloved did not fully realise that I was Dirtwoman – and in any case he was so pleased to be relieved of juggling washing, hoovering, shopping, cooking, cleaning, ironing and washing up with the demands of a very full-time job that he didn’t give it too much thought – except always to be willing to help Dirtwoman whenever asked.

Some homes don’t actually have a Dirtwoman. When the estate of my beloved’s previous marriage was split 50/50 and the family home sold, he and I cleaned through. I spent an evening scrubbing, bleaching, de-greasing another woman’s kitchen – because in that home they had Careerwoman and Intellectualwoman and Findyoursoulwoman – but they had no Dirtwoman as such.

We have lodgers share our home with us, and all of them have been very clean and tidy. They do their own laundry and washing up; they cook for themselves and keep their rooms pleasant and tidy. But it is always Dirtwoman who crawls around on her hands and knees scrubbing the floors; who cleans around and in and behind the toilet; who moves the shampoo bottles and bleaches the bits of the bath where mould grows if you don’t; who bleaches the shower curtain, and scrubs the grime that gathers in the corner of the window frames, and empties the bins, and scrubs out the recycling boxes and takes a nail brush to the moulding on the skirting boards and brushes the yard.

There is a glorious exception. In our house, my beloved cleans the oven. Last night at my request (graciously and willingly) he also took the remainder of the stew that had gone bad up the garden and buried it. When he dies, he will go straight to heaven for this. God sees.

My mother has been a Dirtwoman Extraordinaire all her life. I remember the Lost Soul feeling of coming home early from school on the last day of term – when home was not yet home as I knew it, with home-made cake and jam sandwiches, but a Grim Place dominated by floor wax, Windowlene and Jif.

I was okay with the nappies when my children were babes – though despite all my eco-principles I have advised my daughter to let go of this one Shining Act of Environmental Responsibility – stuff the terries: go for disposable. Mopping up sick, pee, spilt food and drinks: the mountains of washing up and laundry, the endless sorting of belongings – I felt this was fair enough.

Around and after the ending of my first marriage, every member of our family went through multiple moves; and we were a kind of corporate Dirtwoman as each inhabitant marched out. We bagged and boxed and carried and scrubbed and wiped and swept. I guess that was okay.

I’ve even been a Dirtwoman by trade; skivvying as a cleaner and as a care assistant shovelling in Ready Brek at one end and catching it as it came out the other. I guess that was okay: I needed the money.

When I got together with my beloved, I used at first to stay some weekends at his place, and he came and stayed some weekends with me. When I went to stay at his place I’d clean through; hoovering, polishing, washing the floors, cleaning down the bathrooms, doing the ironing. Sometimes his ex-wife would have been to stay with his daughter while he was away, and left behind some big oven dishes from a roast dinner for me to clean up. I guess it was okay. My beloved was grateful, and I do love him very much.

When I go to stay with my family, sometimes I dabble as a Dirtwoman – it doesn’t hurt to pick up a cloth and help out, and they all have their hands full earning a living or raising a family.

And just now I am getting a home ready to sell. They say, don’t they, that it doesn’t matter too much about the condition of the home you sell: hey, don’t try too hard! – the next people will want to do things their own way; they will expect to re-decorate, re-carpet, change everything to their own tastes. Will they? I am not convinced. I try to imagine myself viewing a house and thinking, ‘Oh, cat-sick stains on the carpet, toilet stained dark brown, walls in need of painting – woohoo! I was hoping it would be this way; now I can refurbish a whole house! Out of my way! Here comes Dirtwoman!’ Nah. I’d rather it was clean and fresh and ready to move into, every time.

What I would really like is to live in a shed. One small room. Almost no belongings. A brush, a cloth, flimsy curtains that wash out quick and go up on the line without a struggle, without hurting my neck and my arms; a bucket toilet. People think a bucket toilet in the shed where you live is not hygienic and not private. I think shitting in the middle of a house where everyone can hear you and smell you is not private, and you can clean a bucket a lot more effectively than a flush toilet. And cooking over charcoal outdoors, draining dishes on the grass, is clean. The stuff that accumulates in sink traps and the powder drawer of washing machines is disgusting.

But I have to choose between the way I would like to live, and the companion I would like to live with, who prefers a large house, two bathrooms, a nice fitted kitchen – and lots and lots and lots of ornaments. Memorabilia.


I have chosen the person. Not without struggle, I admit. There have been a series of moments when I have almost, almost chosen the way of life instead. For the freedom. Because I want to live with cleanliness, order and peace; I don’t want dust and moulds and parasites and grease and the stains of spilt food and drink and the stains of stuff that dropped out of the orifices of living beings: but I don’t want to be Dirtwoman any more either. I don’t want to choose between using a toilet with stuck-on bits of shit from who knows which resident, or scraping it off myself. I don’t want every day to clean out the slimy bits of onion and soya and hair stuck round the thing that catches stuff as water goes down the kitchen sink plug. I don’t want to scrub the stuck-on gunk off the wire racks on the draining board and under the washing up bowl, or poke out the slime mould that gathers under the draining board drain-holes with a knife. I don’t want to poke out the grey fluff that gathers where the radiator pipe goes into the floor.

Not now, not never, not ever again. I like to be clean, but I hate being the household dalit, everybody’s Dirtwoman.

This last time, as we move house, I will be Dirtwoman. But after we have moved, Dirtwoman will have resigned. Even while I think about it, I have no idea how I can share a home with a bunch of other people and accomplish this.

But I will. Somehow I will.

The enemy of cleanliness and order is the accumulation of possessions. Everywhere stuff accumulates there is either filth or a Dirtwoman. The gift of life was not meant for this.

Dynamic Light (write your own sermon)

As a child in church, the coloured light coming through the stained glass windows attracted and nourished me. The pictures in the glass I found somewhat of an impediment, distracting from the vitality of the coloured glass and the light.

Stained glass is an amazing art form, absorbing to gaze upon, because the relationship of the artefact and the context is so dynamic.

Alice’s calendar glass stands on the cill of the windows in a curving bay facing north, in a house built on a hillside sloping downwards towards the east. The entering of the light changes dramatically as the year turns. At this point of the year, the light slants strongly into bay from the western side at evening. At all times of the year light floods up from the east as the sun rises.

For privacy (the window looks onto a residential street, from which the house is separated only by a tiny garden) a curtain made from the finest Indian cotton (it’s a pistachio green sari in fact) has been hung in the window.

Some of the glass in the calendar panel is white (clear), some is old, faintly green, window glass. Two of the figures set in the panel (John the Baptist and the Christ Child, for the solstices) are glass sculpts (lost wax technique), the other two – Oestre and Michael, the equinox archetypes – are in pale porcelain clay.

As the day and the year change, the light speaks differently through the glass. When the light fades in the late evening, the glass figures of John the Baptist and the Christ Child become quite dark, and the pale clay figures appear light by comparison. As the light of morning and (at some times of the year) evening come slanting through, the clay figures recede, the light now inhabiting the translucent material of John the Baptist and the Christ Child.

The light green, the folds, and the gauzy texture of the sari window curtain, and the palest green and handblown texture of (some of) the glass panels, also interact dynamically with the light: and in some places the glazing bars of the window create shadow – though where exactly depends on the direction of the light slanting in.

Goodness me. There are so many metaphors in this that I hardly know where to begin.

The Summer Solstice when the light is at its xenith, represented here by John the Baptist (whose feast occurs at that point in the year), a man full of light, of whom Christ said there was no greater in the kingdom of God.

The Spring Equinox, when the light balances and fertility flows, represented here by Oestre (Easter, resurrection, new life, in the Christian church) the pregnant woman in porcelain clay.

Yul, the turn, at the winter solstice, the coming into the dark world of the infant light, represented here by the translucent figure of the Christ Child.

At the Autumn Equinox (again a time of fecundity and flow as the light balances in the time of harvest) and the feast of St Michael and All Angels, the flaming figure of Michael the Archangel, who points towards the coming of the dark times, and calls us to prepare.

Calligraphy by Alice Wilcock

What would he do?

I admire and salute the teaching of Wayne Dyer. Namaste, Wayne Dyer.

Here are two things he said that I love:

"Attachment to being right creates suffering. When you have a choice to be right, or to be kind, choose kind and watch your suffering disappear."

and

"The measure of your life will not be in what you accumulate, but in what you give away."

I think that we could do without a lot of books and courses and sermons and discipleship programmes and commentaries and study guides if we had just those two pieces of advice and lived by them.

Another phrase that has come back to mind, as I've recently been thinking over decisions I have to make, I came across when I was sixteen, and I read a book by Charles Sheldon called In His Steps. Apparently it was written in 1896. I don't think I realised it was that old when I read it - it seemed to be up to date enough to make sense to me.

As I generally do, I've forgotten just about everything that Charles Sheldon said in his book; but I think he would be pleased that over the last thirty-five years (in the course of which I have excelled myself in forgetting almost everything everybody tried to teach me from the subjunctive to the reason for thinking about the square on the hypotenuse to Sine, Cosine and Tangent, which may have been the names of the three witches in Macbeth, or a further set of names for Ananias, Azarias and Misael - or Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego as their jazz names ran) I have remembered - are you still with me? - the central point his book was trying to make.

Which is that when we have a decision to make, we should ask ourselves the question "What would Jesus do?"

It's a question I come back to. During those thirty-five years, I've heard it maligned and belittled on occasion. Sophisticated churchmen have explained as to a little child that it's an irrelevant question because Things Are Different Nowadays (Jesus would never have understood) and because in any case (trump card - lean forward, permit a little triumph to enter the voice): 'You are not Jesus!!!'

Seems reasonable.

But I know that 'What would Jesus do?' is a good question, and this is how I know.

From time to time I get in trouble with People In Authority. I don't know why, but as a rule with a few encouraging exceptions they don't like me. And one time when I was a minister I was in trouble with a representative of church authority. I hadn't done anything wrong, but he wasn't pleased with me or with the way I was going about things. And in the privacy and security of his office he let me know that I was using the church for my own purposes, twisting the truth, leaking confidential information, deceiving the church, and a number of equally reprehensible things that in fact I had not done, though what I had done had put him in a bit of a spot for sure (told the truth and kept on telling it).

It was a difficult and exhausting interview, and things were not going well. I was getting tired and worn down by all these accusations, and I was groping around inside my soul for something I could put my hand on that would steady me. And what came to my hand was that question I'd read when I was sixteen. So I explained to this important Man of God that years ago when I was a teenager someone had taught me when in doubt to ask the question 'What would Jesus do?'; and that when I applied it to my current situation I knew for certain that Jesus would not have spoken to me in the way this important churchman had been speaking to me - and that was how I knew it couldn't be right for him to follow this line of approach. And I said it simply. I wasn't rude.

He went ballistic - how dare I say such things to him and he was going to throw me out, terminate the conversation forthwith und so weite: and that's how I stumbled upon the understanding that this is a real question that cuts to the heart of things. "What would Jesus do?" is a question that peels back the layers and reveals the wisdom that lies underneath all the posturing and manoeuvering that belong to the power and greed fixations of the Kingdom of Mammon that has so many people unwittingly tight in its thrall.

An odd thing, that I would not necessarily have expected, is that when with an honest and humble heart I ask myself the question "What would Jesus do?" I find no difficulty in identifying the answer. Sometimes it's hard to ask the question, and there are many people who have an interest in making a person feel foolish and childish and uninformed for asking it. But it's a question that with surprising rapidity propels me up the ladders, and has a way of saving me from the poison of some of the snakes.

I asked it today as I sat quietly thinking in Fiona's little room in the tribe house. And as usual, the answer came hot on the heels of the question, and now I know what to do.

"Attachment to being right creates suffering. When you have a choice to be right, or to be kind, choose kind and watch your suffering disappear."

"The measure of your life will not be in what you accumulate, but in what you give away."

"What would Jesus do?"

Three thoughts I recommend.