Composing a Life

frequent moves through the Kalahari Desert. * As is true anywhere, there is a need for shelter; desert temperatures may drop below freezing at night. This need is met by a shallow concavity scooped out of the ground and lined with grasses. There, body warmth can be sheltered from the wind and conserved by a piece of hide. But such a shelter cannot be considered a home, even for a night, unless it has a hearth and an entrance as well as space to lie. The alignment of these establishes the internal order needed for privacy and propriety, and distinguishes the woman’s side of the fire from the man’s side, to keep elemental forces sorted out for the health of the community and success in hunting. For the Bushmen, a curved branch, leaning sideways, one end embedded in the ground, is the necessary minimum to define an entrance. The arrangement of concavity, hearth, and doorway orders the common activities of a household; it defines the home. When people live together, the high purposes of that common living, including the binding and the freeing of each, become expressed in very concrete details. The details vary, and we can experiment with changing them as we wish, but material tokens are a necessary part of those relationships.
    All human groups share food in one way or another, often using different kinds of food differently. The Bushmen share the roots and nuts gathered by the women within the household, while they divide the game killed by the men among the larger community of the band. But not all human groups use the ceremony of eating together to establish and maintain relationships as we have tended to do in the Western tradition, and as we have elaborated in our Eucharists and Seders and wakes. The Passover Seder is an elaboration of the institution anthropologists call “commensality,” eating at a common table. The rituals of the Seder echo the function of other family meals in defining relationships and reaffirming and passing on tradition, but this is not true for all cultures. A young American woman who went to Manus Island in New Guinea with my mother was scandalized to see her taking her meals alone and not inviting the villagers to join her at the table, convinced she had discovered evidence of racism. But my mother explained that even a traditional Manus feast did not involve eating together, but rather offering gifts of food to be taken home: families and friendships were not defined by shared meals.
    It is not necessarily ominous that the formal family dinner is declining in many households or becoming limited to special occasions. We might be better off if we could separate food as nourishment and pleasure from food as the currency of care that leaves so many woman laboring long hours to prove affection in that semantic muddle called nurturance. There is a splendid lesson to be learned from the elaborate labor involved in infant feeding during the forties and fifties—the sterilization, the equipment, the rigid schedules—before the rediscovery of the simplicity of the breast. The ideal is to find simple forms that can be elaborated for delight or turned into art rather than onerous obligations. But the giving and receiving of these simpler material tokens of caring will still be essential.
    As I began to think about the lives of the women in this project, I was struck by the diversity of their homes and the spaces they had created to live and work, by these concrete expressions of who they are. Joan is the only one of us who has spent long periods of her life as a traditional full-time homemaker. I have visited the Eriksons in at least half a dozen of their houses across the country. Joan talks about the sense of light and openness she tries to achieve for Erik, and I recognize familiar brightly colored pieces of art and handicraft from one house to the next, but they are always artfully recombined, each object at rest in its new place. Of all us, Joan has the clearest understanding of how objects that enrich the senses can also enrich human relationships.
    It is possible to create a context of sharing with very simple material cues. This idea is best expressed by the old notion of sacrament. This word has been shaped and often abused by the Christian tradition, but it is still useful to express an idea that occurs in many cultures: that the most ordinary materials, like bread and clay, as well as those that are rare and shining, are carriers of meaning, and that the proper actions taken with