Welcome to the Church of the Laundromat

For weeks I’ve been toying with the phrase “Church of the Laundromat.” It embodies that feeling I get on a quiet, cool Sunday morning all by myself reading, working on a creative project, and at some point taking myself for a trip to the blessed laundromat. I feel like a brand new person after the mundane errands: when I arrive home with a neatly folded basket of clean clothes or a car full of happy groceries. This feeling is church to me. This feeling is the ordinary divine I’m living for.

I was trying to figure out how to turn it into an essay: “Welcome to the Church of the Laundromat.” But I haven’t found all of the words for it yet.

I’m keeping it at the top of my page - and writing everything else until maybe something sensible comes out. 

I want to use this space to tell stories. I want it to be an intimate space, but I’m still terribly afraid of being myself on the internet. Can I find the appropriate level of processing to do in a public place? Is it too self-centered? I take hope from my favorite blogs I’ve read over the years. Far from self-centered, I’ve found them generous and relatable as I live through my own seasons of doubt and elation.

Today I read this quote, taken from a 2013 NYT article: “The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine, and retell the story of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones.”

I love that phrasing: not the bad times, but the difficult, the hard. It means we aren’t just indifferent sufferers, but active participants writing and changing and telling our own gd stories. 

Here we go. Here’s to imperfect beginnings, begun again.