Consider the lilies

I don't like detailing the minutae of my life, but to prove something of a point this morning I must. Yesterday, started feeling very sick at work yesterday, flu-like symptoms, and went home for the afternoon. Got here, felt better, and sewed one of these. The F-word came home, had a nice chat about stuff, he did his carpentry thing while I finished off the circle pad (if it works, I'm fucking sold - lovely easy pattern and relatively tidy-looking once done). Spent some more pleasant time with the love of my life, he cooked dinner, I did laundry, we ate dinner, watched the funniest episode of Bottom I've seen so far. I felt quite tender towards him, so baked some oatmeal cookies (these ones, though giving the butter flavoured shortening [????] a miss in flavour of more butter, and used crunchy evaporated cane juice instead of white and brown suger, and gave the raisins a miss altogether for the simple reason of not having any), which were good. Spent more pleasant time. Finished reading the Periodic Table. Went to bed happy.

Woke up this morning. Realized I had to go to work all day. Nearly puked, got headache, nose started running.

My point is, even at the laziest of times I'm not a lily of the field, who neither spins nor toils, and Solomon in his glory was probably arrayed rather more tidily than me (Matthew 6). Left to my own devices I find things to do - tender things, utilitarian things, things that exercise my spatial relations, which I realized as I was executing yesterday's simple pattern have not been much exercised for a long, long time - and oh, it felt so good to exercise them just a wee bit yesterday!

I have a sort of unfocussed hunger for a life with more time, for an escape from the slavery we've imposed on ourselves; before the Industrial Revolution nobody incinerated so much of their lives in a profession, even the farmers got the winter off! It's contrary to our genetic makeup to do the same damn thing all day every day, and then try to cram our entire animal existence into our weekends - to devote the bulk of our waking hours to the abstract accumulation of money, of an intangible, of something whose value fluctuates on the whims of markets and speculators, and is totally beyond our control as individuals, or even a society!

In short, feeling like I have quite a strong Messianic lifestyle message this morning. I wonder how many Messiahs this credit crunch is going to produce.