I have certainly enjoyed knitting and baking lately (obviously), but I promised that I wouldn't spend the whole week talking about yarn and coconut. Because while I've been purling away and eating frosting, I have been pondering about the connection between what we are experiencing economically as a nation (and as families) and Nesting.
I recognize that on the surface these two things don't appear to have much in common--"making a home" and the very complex web that is our global financial system. But at the most basic level, we respond to the global economy First through the way we manage our households.
Now, I love to decorate and bake and craft as much as the next person (well, probably more...), but behind all of these activities, I am making active decisions about my engagement with the outside world. Where I buy my "stuff," for instance, influences the way businesses function. How I manage my money directly influences how vulnerable I am to some of these larger-than-life trillion dollar corporate financial troubles. Choices I make to repurpose things, or create them from scratch, invests resources into a specific type of economy (small, green, informal) and divests them from another type of economy (large, formal, corporate). My decisions to live within the means of one income, and my choice to leave the traditional workforce--even those directly impact my relationship with the modern global business world--in some ways for better, and in others potentially for worse.
A few days ago I talked about Nesting as a pursuit of beauty--one of the hallmarks of civilization--and how creating safe and beautiful spaces, no matter how small or insignificant, is...well...significant. The same applies here with home and the economy. The small, mundane, unglamorous decisions that we make on a day to day basis from our households (verses the Very Large, flashy decisions being debated this week in Congress) have consequences and influence.
Obviously there is a lot more that can be said about this topic, but I'm just trying to grease my own mental wheels! The overall point, I suppose, is that knitting and coconut cupcakes, and the choices that go behind them, matter.
Who knew domesticity could be so deep?
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