It's good to be home again after five days away, even though those five days included dinner with some dear friends, followed by a glass of chartreuse pretty enough to photograph. Charteuse is delicious, but it's also possibly the most visually beautiful liqueur in all the world. It's increasingly hard to find, so I particularly appreciated our friend Aaron's assiduity in tracking it down and keeping it on hand for appreciative guests like me. Before marriage and children, he spent some time discerning a monastic vocation while living with us, in a phase when we always had a bottle of chartreuse in the freezer for after-dinner consumption --- so what goes around comes around, at least a little. Also, I'm glad the call to marriage and family won, ten years ago now, because his wife is wonderful, and their four children are a delight to be around.
BUT it's good to be home. I didn't take selfies regularly while I was away, because most of my outfits are things I've worn before (funny how that works --- and it does work). Here are a few that I did take, however:
1. Leaving for the road last Thursday, in my Fiona dress with thrifted silver silk/cashmere beaded cardigan, navy merino Snag tights, Xero Tari boots. It was really cold then, but I was warm.
2. Fast-forward to Monday, when I wore my Audrey dress with my new Icebreaker merino rose-pink long-sleeved tee, Tari boots (the one shoe I took with me on this trip, and they did serve my every need, from home to church to a long walk to visiting with friends), and my old linen scarf.
I did also wear Audrey to Mass on Sunday with my cranberry-redyed thrifted cotton cardigan: a good look. Additionally, I forgot to pack a nightdress, so I slept alternately in Sierra (too hot; my mother keeps her thermostat at 80F) and Audrey, who was still fresh and wearable the next day. Certainly nobody would have known that I'd worn my dress something like 36 hours straight, and I did not enlighten them.
Another Audrey shot in my mother's closet, which contains the only full-length mirror in the entire house:
And a close-up, because I like these pale pinky purples, or purply pinks, or whatever you want to call them --- especially in winter when my skin tone isn't so sun-kissed as in the summer.
3. Tuesday, driving home:
Fiona again, with teal-striped leggings and Taris. Really channeling the Hanna Andersson dresses and leggings my daughters wore as little girls.
4. Today, I started out like this:
Reuniting with my marine-blue Maggie dress after a weekend away. One of the advantages of having a rota of dresses --- and I now have one for each weekday --- is that the ones I've worn all weekend can air for a few days before I really need to put them back on. They don't need washing, just some time to refresh on the rack, then hang in the closet. Meanwhile, Maggie, having done all that, is fresh and ready to roll.
But then it was hot. The high today is supposed to be 66F. So when I came back from walking the dog, I tweaked my outfit to accommodate the change in temperature:
Again, I'm glad to reunite with my Maggie dress. Camellia, too, will come in for some wear this week, after hanging for a good while. I'm also grateful to have changes of shoes. My Tari boots served me very well while traveling, but some variety and choice is a good thing. I'm glad that my choices are the right things, by which I mean, things I really want to wear, and ways I really want to look. I'm not defaulting to, say, a pair of sneakers and trying to make it work. I feel good about deciding that I don't like sneakers and am not a sneaker person. I feel good about having spent money to buy sneaker alternatives --- comfortable walking shoes --- that actually look the way I want my shoes to look. These are decisions I don't regret on a daily basis. I don't regret them at all, ever. I'm glad I made myself make them.
Enjoying my red Xero Cassies with my otherwise tonal navy outfit. And Dora, who missed me while I was away.
I won't bore you with my usual rant against minimalism, but this feels like a nice balance to me. I actively like not wearing a single dress into the ground. I like it on aesthetic grounds, first of all. I do not always want to wear the same color or style, and because I am not a nun and am bound by no vows, there's nothing wrong with that. But I also like variety on the grounds that each dress is saved some wear and tear by having time to rest. They get dirty that much less quickly, not that I wash them all that often anyway. They undergo less stress. I don't need more dresses than I can realistically wear in a week. Seven would be the absolute outside, I think, and even that . . .
I mean, I get by fine currently with five, and a lot depends on how quickly my oldest dresses, which I have worn the hardest, start to wear out past the "acceptable public appearance" point, whatever that is. While I can always want more dresses, because they are there to be wanted, and they seem to be the only thing I wear, day in and day out, realistically I'm at a point where --- however you want to define need --- my perceived wardrobe needs are met.
And I think that's important. We all know that a diet that makes you feel deprived isn't sustainable over the long term. While some self-denial is good for us, at least temporarily, most of us in ordinary lay life are not called to extraordinary levels of asceticism, at least not for long. Our lives are an integrated whole, so when I talk about clothes, I'm not not talking about the spiritual life, which means that when I say that we can make ourselves feel punished or deprived or stressed by the level of asceticism that surrounds our clothing choices, I'm saying that it's not culpably self-indulgent to pay attention to that. Whether we're cold, or we're stretched to dress appropriately for the demands of our lives, or we're just bored with what we have, to the point that it's really starting to get us down: it's not culpably self-indulgent to attend to those things.
Our choices that carry forward for the long term, in perseverance, tend to have a far more profound effect on our lives, including our spiritual lives, than our short-lived bursts of whatever feels to us like extreme self-denial. If we go on and on feeling that our needs aren't met, even needs that feel so trivial to us that maybe we feel guilty for experiencing them as needs, then we will lie down in the road and have trouble getting up again. Better to do whatever it takes to keep walking, because that, actually, is how you get somewhere. Note that I'm not saying better to buy ALL the things, because FOMO will kill you! I'm saying: do whatever it takes to keep walking.
So, again, this is important. I feel that it's important to say as a corrective to a lot of the sustainability messaging, even though in general I'm a fan of the idea of sustainability. That is to say, I want --- insofar as I am able --- to make choices that reflect careful stewardship of the created order, including both natural and human resources. I want, insofar as I am able, not to support environmentally destructive practices. I want, insofar as I am able, not only not to support slavery and human trafficking, but to support, actively, business and other models whose alternatives could potentially limit those evils, if not outright ending them. I do think that the choices I make matter in the world, and that as a Catholic it is my responsibility to choose prudently.
But as a Catholic, it's also my responsibility to cultivate gratitude and joy --- and not to be a gnostic about it. I have a body. I have to clothe the body. I exist in a material world, with its material cultures and resources, and those things are good. They are gifts, not evils. I'm not in religious life and am not bound by the particular vows and renunciations of that life. That's not my vocation. My vocation is to live with joy and abundance in the world. My vocation is to understand that what's good about the world's abundance is that it comes from God, not that it is a god itself, with any intrinsic power to make me happy or unhappy.
I suppose Thanksgiving is a good time to be thinking about things like this. Although it's basically a secular cultural holiday, you can't be Catholic and not perceive its sacramentality. If it's about abundance, and gratitude for that abundance: where did the abundance come from? To whom do we return our fitting thanks? Are we feasting just to stuff our faces (I mean, yes, thanks, around here we do stuff our faces), or are we feasting because the Bridegroom is never not with us, and we are called to rejoice in His goodness?
Of course, even abundance is a relative term. Chartreuse, for example, is in short supply right now. My friend Aaron rations out the bottles he has. Fortunately chartreuse is the kind of thing you can't drink a lot of --- but my goodness, did the two little glasses I drank the other night feel abundant. It felt more abundant, really, than five or six glasses would have felt, mostly because if I'd drunk that much I'd have been first unconscious, then sick. So abundance doesn't necessarily mean a lot. It just means enough of something, plus not feeling guilty because you're enjoying it.
And the reason you don't feel guilty isn't that you're entitled to that abundance. It's not your right. You don't enjoy it, whatever it is, because you deserve it. Those things aren't even relevant. They don't matter. You don't earn God's abundant generosity. He just gives it to you. He gives it to you, whatever it is, because He loves you. His love means that He wants abundance for you, not scarcity. He does not stint in His giving, ever.
And all you can do is say, Thanks.
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PS: I really love my Maggie dress. I often forget how much I love her. She's so versatile, yet so simple. A great dress to wear today when it hasn't been cold at all --- but so easy to layer when it is. Such a graceful, lovely, forgiving shape.
Really, all the dresses I currently own --- Camellia, Sierra, Maggie, Fiona, Audrey --- are dresses I'd buy again in other colors. The shapes and styles and weights are different, and each one is versatile in its own way, and I often glance at the color options for each one to see whether there are new offerings. Now, this doesn't mean that I am going to buy all these dresses again in other colors. I do have kind of a mental hierachy of styles that I'd like to repeat. Maggie is pretty much at the top of that hierarchy, just because she is such a simple, graceful, easy, adaptable dress. I have no plans to buy anything else at all anytime soon, but since this seems to be an enduring style at Wool&, I figure the colors bear watching . . .