yoga diary - day three

Today my practice felt difficult. It seemed long at the beginning, hard in the middle and cluttered, busy. I got through it and I'm glad but it put me into this domestic frame of mind where I felt I had a thousand chores to do and not nearly enough time to do them.

To address this urgent and uncomfortable feeling, I gave myself the morning for chores. As I was cleaning the bathroom I couldn't help but think of my Grandmother and at the same time, notice I am still removing the final traces of my tenant's habits.

I like my bathroom to be clean, spotless by most people's standards. I don't think I'm overly careful about the floor but you would probably be safer eating your lunch in my bathroom than you would at most public tables - actually, I'm sure of that. You'd probably be safer eating lunch in my bathroom than most people's kitchens and that includes, sometimes, my own.

As I scrub and rinse the white porcelain basins I think of my Grandmother doing the very same thing. I think of the spiral of water as it spins down the drain, sometimes pushed along by my hand, how it reflects the spiral of the galaxy, the whirlpool in the river, the pattern of seeds on a sunflower or a dandelion. I remember my Grandmother's hard work and today I thought about what she would have used to clean with.

She would have had vinegar and baking soda and not much else.

Now I know that is very fashionable right now but I use scouring powder (which she did have at the end of her life) and sometimes I use bleach - which she also had and loved.

People seem to think there was never any reason to move from baking soda to bleach to whatever is in the scrubbing bubbles can and that annoys me more and more.

Chemical cleansers were part of the first wave of feminism geared to the lower classes. If your Grandmother cleaned her own house, chances are she moved from spending hours scrubbing with all her might using vinegar and baking soda and yes, a brush and boiling water to using a soft cloth, hot water and scouring powder. The change cut her time and effort down by at least a half and maybe quite a lot more.

Organic does not mean magical. If you choose to use organic products you need to remember your Grandmother. Chances are excellent that she tailored her formulas and her methods to her specific place and time and also to her family and their patterns of use. She spent hours on this - you cannot get the same results by sloshing half a cup of vinegar into the sink and splodging it around. Organic cleaning is an advanced method as much as anything else and it will (and should) eat your time. It ate your Grandmother's I promise you that.

Many of us are old enough to have Mothers who are grandmothers now and even older. I noticed pretty early on in the return to organics and environmental responsibility that my Mother's response was to clean less often and conserve more water and more of other resources.

This was not done out of laziness. My Mother's response typifies the kind of response that is deeply feminine. When we recognize a solution as being too flawed to ultimately be workable we work around it. In the case of my mother, it's a kind of domestic cap and trade.

I've found I do it myself. I use cleaning products that are not organic in order to buy myself the extra hours but I don't flush the toilet after around 11 until morning and I look at other conservation measures. I don't buy plastic wrap -limit plastic products period. I live somewhere walkable and walk to do most of my errands. This didn't start out by choice but it has become my preferred method of combining exercise, conservation, frugality and eco-kindness. Anything that gives you four distinct benefits for one effort is worth it. As far as statistics are concerned, I am in the 13 per cent that eats right and gets more than enough exercise on a regular basis. This is not because I am good or smart or disciplined, it's because I built it into my life such that I really don't have any other choice.

I think we tend to expand to fit the space we're given. This applies to luxuries too. I think we eat too much because we're offered too much, we hire housekeepers and maintain distance from the detritus of our daily, (intimate) lives, because we can. People offer to take over our unpleasantness for money. Whenever someone offers to buy your discomfort - be wary. It's probably not a good idea.

We sit on the couch cause the couch is there.

For some of us it requires drastic measures to change that - it didn't for our Grandmothers because they grew into their habits over time. When an older woman is reluctant to make a change, I think it is possible that as often as not it's because the way she does things as they are has hidden benefits and the loss of those benefits would mean losses in other areas of her life.

The woman who has figured out how to use organic cleansers and doesn't want to change? Well, leave her alone. Also leave alone the woman who uses bleach and bounce and all the rest of it because I will bet you anything she's making up for it somewhere else in her life and probably doing a pretty good job of it too.

Feminism is whatever benefits women, the same is true of environmental consciousness. Just because it doesn't fit your view of it, doesn't mean it isn't valid.