While waiting for my coffee to brew this morning, I searched online for a rug. Before my coffee was ready, I purchased a hand-knotted rug from Turkey for my living room in Upstate NY which will be delivered within the next two weeks from far, far away. I put my phone down, poured milk into my mug, drank coffee, and felt satisfied with my impulsive purchase. (I do not know the satisfaction of creating a hand-knotted rug, do you?)
Earlier this week, I asked our project intern if she would mind making us coffee as we needed to grind the coffee beans. I was uncomfortable with the grinder. I have a strange phobia of small household appliances. I have used a handheld whisk rather than turn on the KitchenAid for many years. I would classify it as an aversion versus a phobia, but it’s a dicey determination. Something called Oikophobia.
The intern asked me why I was afraid of machines. I answered, saying, “I like to feel the earth under my feet. To be physically connected, I prefer walking to other modes of transportation. I think it has to do with speed.” I do love the train, though.
Once, I went across the country on the train as a self-directed artist residency. I met a man from Tunisia who became my pen pal from Paris. My friend is a computer scientist and philosopher working on a theory of imagination. We connected over questions of fate. Last week he sent me a drawing that AI drew of me from its imagination.
This week I participated in an exercise of placing myself in someone else’s shoes to walk in their footsteps. The challenge was I had to choose between two disabilities pulled from a hat. I chose debilitating depression over losing my two hands. When I walked in their imagined path, I learned that our capitalist system, which values the commodification of our time and output, didn’t have the spaciousness to include the erratic productivity of someone whose system sank sometimes. I also learned that I felt the same feelings of not-enoughness now with my able body and mind that I imagined I would feel with depression. Why? I wondered.
Later this week, I considered the forms we force ourselves to inhabit that don’t feel like home out of a desire to “fit in” to a larger collective form that reflects our perceived value back to us.
As I walked home today and saw the crow on the branch and the eagle soar above me, I wondered what it would be like to be so close to living that every action held the immediate satisfaction of purposefulness, that there was no worry that one didn’t do enough to fit-in.
How did we stop touching our own needs? With increasing speed and automated hands, we have pushed ourselves into obsolescence in our own homes.
It is spring now. Birds are breaking eggs open. Petals are pushing out of their buds. There are necessary and natural ruptures created to unfurl into our whole selves.
All this walking around these questions.
There is a curious relationship between the fear of household appliances and the fear of home rooted in the word Oikophobia. I would classify it as a misunderstanding. The word Oikos is a Greek word for home, and the root of Eco which is the root of Economy, and Economy originally meant the management of the household.
Oikophobia began as the fear of the home and shared a synonym in our English language at the turn of the century; Wanderlust. Wanderlust roots itself in German culture and means the enjoyment of strolling stemming from an intense urge for self-development through experiencing the unknown, leaving home to walk outdoors, discovering unity in nature, and maybe a drive to escape feelings of guilt and depression.
It is strange to conflate fear of the home with wanderlust as I see wanderlust as a homecoming.
Now, oikophobia has shifted with modern life to mean fear of small household appliances.
I suffer from oikophobia and wanderlust.
My oikophobia is a repulsion to an unnatural speed whose help does more harm than good. I feel most at home walking outside, where I feel my body, my thoughts, and nature unite. Where a harmonious rhythm syncs these three layers of being together.
When I saw the crow in the tree, I saw her looking for twigs to build her nest. This is her work. She may feel displaced if she only had to look at her phone and order a ready-made nest from somewhere else.
When I think of my friend who shared a portrait of me from AI, I am tickled I am in his imagination over AI imagination. I wonder what he would have seen if he had been walking in the woods these days versus sitting all day in front of a computer. But he is paid to sit, not to walk. He suffers too from feelings of not-enoughness and not fitting in. We have talked together about what he would do with his life if his time was not monetized, and some of the things would include: singing, traveling, writing, and sharing his ideas with others. But he has been working to buy a home.
I’m afraid this essay could wander down a long path for much longer. What seems important to note is that our economy, and our management of resources, are creating human obsolescence and that the system of capitalism is not a one size fits all. Our growing dependence on machines and faster acquisition do not liberate our movements but instead harden the shells that imprison our stagnate bodies–our nature.
The invitation is to rupture these false beliefs like a bird cracking open its shell, like a flower pushing through its bud, like a butterfly opening its cocoon, to wake up to our enoughness that cannot fit into capitalism but that belongs here and now together on this earth, our home.
Maybe one way is to get outside and walk a little…
I leave you with a quote from Rebecca Solnit from her book, Wanderlust. Which ruminates on similar questions.
The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world that seems to be accelerating around them. Too, the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued — that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more productive, or faster paced… I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
Exercise: Set your timer for twenty-one minutes.
Do: Walk outside your door and every chance you have to turn, turn in the direction you wouldn’t normally go. When the timer ends stand still and notice what is happening everywhere. Where are you now?
Dare: Continue walking aimlessly for another hour.
Tell me how it went!