About Living Laundry

As a kid, I used to enjoy a family escape every few weeks with my dad and brother to the town Laundromat. There, laundry was the focus, but try telling that to us! After the first loads were started, we’d get quarters and take a whack at the pinball machine.  We’d eat bizarre foods never allowed at home–pizza, candy, and pop. Ok, so the food wasn’t exactly healthy, but this mundane experience was, for us, an unusual treat.

And most importantly, we’d watch in amazement as our father would find a way to engage with every single person in the place; telling captivating stories about everyday life, hearing their stories, making them feel important to him. He engaged community in public–at the grocery store, the gas station, and at the laundromat.  I was totally enthralled with my father’s ability to make even mundane time an interesting opportunity for connection and creativity. By the end of our laundry day, it felt like this everyday place had become a transformative zone where amazing things could happen. Indeed, washing laundry is a worldwide practice that is centered in community, where amazing things do happen. It’s a choice in America. We can put our laundry in the machine and wait impatiently, or we can see who else is there, what else could happen in this captivated time? It was there that I found myself captivated by what can be created in every day life and in everyday public space through community. And I would love to bring this kind of space back to our urban centers.

As I grew older, I carried this story with me like an imprint. While in graduate school, I wrote a letter to a dear friend telling her of a dream I had to create an everyday community-based space where creative, transformative, and community building activities could happen. I told her the story of my visits to the laundromat as a child, and expressed my own concern for how few spaces there are for civil society to interact besides coffee shops (which have now turned into what I call ‘laptop shops’). What if we could create a space like this in a laundromat? I suggested. All she could say was, ‘That’s an amazing vision….go for it.’

Now this was the long-term dream. The day-to-day mundane practice of washing and hanging laundry, for me, is about the daily inner work I both facilitate in myself and in the work I do with individuals, groups, and communities through transformational arts. This is the ‘laundry’ that we must do to stay clean and clear in our world.

Living Laundry gives us the opportunity to transform ourselves and our communities. The very act of transforming through living arts is the creative practice and process of reinventing the self creatively, and realigning your direction to match your intentions and what you wish to create, whether in your body, your neighborhood, your business, your organization, your family, your partnership, or your community.

So, here is my vision for Living Laundry:

• My Personal Business Practice – To become a source for transformative mind-body healing in the local community and abroad through movement arts, life purpose coaching, relationship and sex-positive/poly coaching, subject-guided group laboratories and circle facilitation, and special event leadership.
• Living Laundromat (future community hub and home)- To become a lively, sustainable, public community destination where socially innovative, creative, and transformative happenings are an everyday occurrence. Transformative workshops, classes, laboratories, coaching, and art therapies; plus sustainable laundry facilities, locally grown food, a coffee joint, and an urban farm and farmer’s market are all part of this larger picture.