Domesticity. Making a place for yourself, sharing your home and your knowledge with others, and caring for one another in turn.

Domestic knowledge is sadly absent in many “home” settings today. Millennia-old traditions concerning food, craft, and personal and interpersonal care are simply no longer taught or shared, and we are enough generations into this phenomena that in many instances this knowledge seems lost beyond recovery. We are approaching a sad and dangerous level of ignorance regarding the most basic crafts of care: food for nourishment, clothing and shelter for warmth, and the knowledge to produce these things so vital to nurturing life and continued survival. People grow up not knowing how to cook, and worse not having a clue about what’s in their food and what they are putting into their bodies. We think remedies are only found in plastic bottles. We have no idea where our winter coats come from, how they were made, what they are made of, or whose hands labored over their construction.

There was a time when all food was to be prepared by hand, often communally, along with recipes, traditions and knowledge about plant and animal use that were passed down through generations. Clothing and shelter were constructed with those same fingers, and the knowledge about what tools and materials to was also crucial learning, shared among families and communities as these life-sustaining items were carefully crafted. These practices are truly timeless, and kept their status as vital lessons in some way through much of the industrial age, yet in recent generations have all but disappeared.

Domestic knowledge implies a great level of mutual care, and places the individual in a critical role of personal responsibility and powerful agency. One should know how to care for themselves and others in the event of an emergency, but this notion of “care” should not be limited to extreme situations. Knowing how to do things for our selves allows us to tap into the potential of our own ability effect the world around us; it is this vital sense of agency that is lost when we no longer have any knowledge of the most basic means of survival.

Our loss of this self-knowledge is the true tragedy of contemporary out-of-the-box living. When an individual has not learned the skill or the knowledge to care for them selves – or is even aware that they could posses such skill – then they have been truly robbed of their agency as a human being. If you can’t use your hands to operate the tools in front of you, what was the use in evolving those awesome opposable thumbs any way? If we do not know how to take care of ourselves, if we do not know how to take care of our families and loved ones, how can we possibly take responsibility for anything around us? If it does not occur to us that we may have the ability to affect our own wellbeing, how will we ever feel that we possess the power to affect anything else?

I’m definitely not a master of household construction of all sorts, and I totally have no clue what I’m doing half the time I try to take on such tasks. Though I would love for some day to own a loom and to have a full vegetable garden, it’s not going to happen right now. And that’s fine. I am certainly not a back to the land extremist or way-anarcho-anti-capitalist, and I even like some corporations (thank you Google for your server space). I definitely love to shop and eat out and would take Pfizer’s advice if I were truly very sick. I am actually pretty optimistic about the future, and am eager for the environmental and lifestyle changes we will all need to make in the coming years. Those changes, however, will require all of us to wake up a bit and rethink how we are acting in and upon the world, and should call us to question the ways others are going about business as well.

We all have a place to start, and it is crucial that we explore these issues with each other. While the tested and true ancient system of gaining knowledge from our families at home is clearly no longer active, we still have our communities and friends as resources. Personal knowledge IS domestic knowledge. The ability to share skills and ideas IS a wonderful human power and should be used. Make something. Use your hands. Take a risk. Ask for advice. Ask someone to teach you something they know how to do. Learn something new together.