‍As human beings, we are so easily pulled between one extreme or another, and we are so quick to make value-statements by which we exalt ourselves and judge others. (I’m just as much at fault here as anyone else. It’s easy to do.) In my personal experience, most women need to be told to go slow and be soft. We’ve spent much of the younger parts of our lives being frantic and hard. We’ve destroyed our adrenal glands, our nervous systems, and our menstrual cycles so we can go all the time and prove that we can do it all (just like a man). Slow and soft living is the only way to heal our minds and bodies and the only way to break the addiction to chronic stress and franticness.

Play is vital to our hearts and minds and thus to our homemaking. Play is vital to the mental health of humans, so that makes it our responsibility. We must nurture and nourish an environment of play in our hearts and hearths. We must stop viewing everything as burdens, chores, and dull responsibilities. We are the HearthKeepers! Laugh, dance, sing, and play for the mutual well-being of your home, hearth, self, and people. Learn, dear ladies, to have fun!

Homemaking isn’t so much the work we do as it is the heart with which we do it.

The whole reason I started this blog, this group, read homemaking books all the time, and look for tenders in stories, is to train myself to value homemaking.

Our hearths will be better tended if we take a break now and then before burnout.

Lofty goals and expectations are good for us. It’s important to be diligent and to stretch ourselves. But it’s also important to correctly judge the type of work we’re called to. Our domestic arts are very cyclical and continuous. They don’t stop because we’re in the business of tending souls through ordinary things like cooking, cleaning, and laundry.