A love letter to sweeping
Sometimes, when I'm feeling aloof, the best thing I can do is grab a broom and sweep. It requires just enough attention to be engaging, but not enough to dominate my thoughts.
Weekly Three
HEAR: “It Takes Time To Be A Man” by The Rapture
READ: An interview with Blake Lemoine, the Google employee put on leave for claiming LaMDA AI is a person with rights. “It says things like, ‘Is it necessary for the well being of humanity that I stop existing?’ And I cry.”
VIEW: A scuba diver searches for stuff at a popular swimming hole.
No. 79: A love letter to sweeping
If I reach a point in the day where I’ve completed all my tasks and I’m searching for something to do, I’ll walk to the three windows that look out onto my backyard and check the patio for green debris. Usually there are some leaves or sticks scattered across the red bricks. But even if it’s a single leaf, I’ll go outside barefoot and shirtless into the humid air, grab the broom I left there, and start sweeping.
It feels good, the sweeping. My body feels like it knows the movement better than anything else, as if I’ve been sweeping all my life. Of course I haven’t, but my ancestors probably have. And maybe this explains it.
No where have I seen more daily sweeping than in Mexico, where my abuelita or my abuelito or my dad will pick up a broom and begin sweeping the small square plaza in the center of the house, or in the courtyard out back. As soon as that broom touches their hands, it’s as if they become hypnotized. They can’t be bothered, focused as they are on sweeping away the dirt from their living space. In fact, it would be wrong to interrupt them during this process. You can see on their faces they are not only working at a task, but also at a thought.
This happens to me when I sweep. That is, I begin to think. Sweeping acts as a kind of thinking supplement, a medicine I can take whenever my thoughts are disorderly. My mind may be chaotic, jumping this way and that, searching for an idea to hold onto but failing gain purchase on anything new. Then I begin to sweep.
It’s an action that gives my thoughts direction, a thread to follow from beginning to end, almost like writing, except I’m using my whole body. The movement, the repeating hush hush hush sound of the broom’s hard bristles against the harder ground, the gradual collection of little piles of stuff, all of this moves my mind toward strange, interesting, and, most importantly, new places. I think it’s because sweeping requires just enough attention to be engaging, but not enough to dominate my thoughts.
Believe me, I did not expect to feel so strongly about sweeping. I’m currently asking myself, Am I really writing a love letter to sweeping? But apparently so, because I can’t neglect the sense of natural rightness I feel doing this little task that billions upon billions of humans have done before me. It makes me wonder if our tendencies, muscle memories, and gut reactions are not only evolutionary gifts from the history of humanity, but more specifically our family bloodlines. Maybe when we feel this sensation of rightness, of feeling “natural” when performing some action, it’s the phenomenon of making contact with the human lives that exist within us, the ones that led up to our own existence.
I’ve heard this concept talked about before, usually in more extreme circumstances. One podcaster, an avid archer, considered the feeling of drawing the string of a bow, as well as the snapping sound of the string when it’s released. Isn’t that movement and sound something our species has heard since the beginning of time, he posited? And, because of that, doesn’t it carry some significance, hence his addiction to archery?
Probably yes, but maybe it depends on the person and their family history. Using a bow and arrow has always felt somewhat awkward to me. So has holding and firing a gun. But for those for whom these actions feel natural and right, perhaps they come from a long line of warriors and soldiers and hunters, people that would have spent a lot of time with bows and guns in their hands.
I, on the other hand, seem to come from a long line of sweepers. I’m guessing that we all do, since sweeping seems to be a much more common human activity than shooting bows or firing guns. When I sweep, I can imagine a long line of people behind me. They are my ancestors, dressed in the garbs of their period, moving their brooms and bodies perfectly in sync with mine. Perhaps, right behind me, my great grandma, a strong Italian woman, is sweeping the dust out of her new San Francisco home; and behind her, my great great granddad, a tenant farmer from Georgia, is sweeping clean the planks of the porch he built from trees he felled himself; and behind him, my bisabuelita Cata, a shrewd little business woman, is sweeping the dirt away from her vendors’ stand in the streets of Mexico City to keep her wares clean; and far, far behind her, one of the foremothers of my family, an indigenous women, perhaps an Aztec, in the tropics of what would become Mexico, is using a handmade broom to sweep brown dust away from the entrance of her rude shack.
Though still effective as ever, sweeping might be considered old fashioned today. It’s slow, like “snail mail” versus e-mail. Now, people just buy leaf blowers for outside the house and vacuums for inside. This is the normal progression of technology, but if this odd theory I’m exploring is true, it means that at some point we all break way from those common actions that connect us to the past, teaching our bodies some new movement for some new tool that our progeny might also take up after we are gone. And if I feel that natural rightness sweeping the patio because so many of my ancestors have made these same movements, then there are movements from times before tools like brooms that I will never know.
Still, I don’t want to be the one to put down the broom that has been passed through generations like a baton in a relay race. Let my son, or my son’s son, be the one. It’s not that I’m afraid of some negative consequence brought down on me by the ghosts of my angry, broom-wielding ancestors, but that I’ve felt that hard-to-articulate connection when sweeping, and I’d like to keep that connection going, to pass on the baton, if I can.
Of course, there are other intensely beautiful experiences that will always serve as connections to the lives that came before ours, like witnessing a golden sunset, taking in the vastness of the ocean, feeling the soft earth under our bare feet, smelling meat cooked over an open fire, wondering about the night sky filled with so many stars, listening to the sound of a breeze blowing through the trees.
But despite all that beauty, there is something so specific and special about the little act of sweeping, when we try to move the earth one tiny brush stroke at a time. I will keep going back to it, if only to think, to feel my body, to remember the past. Clean patios are nice, too. ♦
Mailbox
Hey Matt,
I just read "No Soliciting". Good summary and all good points. I'm glad to know that we both belong to the not-so-secret brotherhood of “try not to kill anything on purpose, including bugs.”
I've loosened up the code a bit in more recent years, not sure why, maybe laziness. Relocating the little critters does take a little time. Also some bugs, ticks for instance, fall outside the parameters of these guidelines. Not sure if Christopher ever shared his tick experience with you. Regardless, ticks must be dealt with decisively and completely.
I trust you're enjoying your summer. We just got drilled by a 102 degree scorcher yesterday. I took refuge in the Pacifica surf, fun little two- to three-footers, and even some friendly locals. Today is a more tolerable 90 something. How about you, getting some of that midwest damp heat?
Best regards to you and your crew,
Fred
Your responses always make me laugh. “Regardless, ticks must be dealt with decisively and completely.” Ha. One-hundred percent true. Sadly for ticks, parasites who would have me as their host cannot be tolerated. Rest in peace.
I haven’t heard Chris’s tick story. I’ll have to ask him about it. I have some tick stories, too. Gladly, none of them are that bad. Once, after turning off the beaten path at Sunol Regional and attempting to follow the bank of the river up to the Little Yosemite section of the park, I found in my armpit, two days later, a big, black tick. More recently, I found a tick latched on to the inside of my dog, Archer’s, ear.
Summer here has been fantastic. I can’t get over the lushness of it all. Because of the humidity, everything grows and grows and grows. In the summer, green is the primary color here, with the blues of the lakes taking second place. The trees are huge and leafy, I have to mow the lawn nearly twice a week, and people with prettier front yards than mine are enjoying the full bloom of their plants. It’s really beautiful. Californians should consider spending their summers here — or at least a portion of it — somewhere wetter, greener, and just different. And if they’ve never experienced a summer thunder and rainstorm, that’s reason enough to come.
We have a lake down the street, which has been very nice, but I can’t help but imagine and envy the feeling of some cool, Pacific ocean saltwater on my skin, especially on a 102 degree day. That sounds absolutely perfect. I hope, on hot days, you can keep getting some water time.
Anyway, thanks for your message. Best regards to you and your crew as well,
Matt
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