What is it like to quit my job and undergo my own emergent creative process? The truth is, I do a lot of laundry.

It never ends, the piles regenerating themselves daily. My friend Sandra describes laundry as a Zen process: “If you can master laundry, you can master life.”

I don’t know when I started wearing lingerie and dancing while I sorted and folded and hung, but I realized how funny it was when my friend Asya was staying with us and caught me in the act. It’s silly but it’s also deep. In Women Who Run With The Wolves (a book Asya gifted to me), Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes about the Baba Yaga, the “Wild Mother” who “instructs the ordering of the house of the soul.” In an archetypal tale, when a younger woman comes to the Yaga for guidance, she sets her to tasks and trials, including washing the clothes. The traditional ritual would have involved descending to a river to “renew the cloth…a symbol for a cleansing and purification of the entire bearing of the psyche.”

“The clothes are like us, worn and worn until our ideas and values are slackened by the passing of time. The renewal, the revivifying, takes place in the water, in the re-discovering of what we really hold to be true, what we really hold sacred.”

I don’t go to the river for my laundry ritual – I enjoy the privilege of modern machines – but I feel the timelessness of this (often women’s) work. And since it must be done, could the work feel like play?

I have a defensive relationship with the word “play.” I always felt self-judgment about the motherhood advice and expectation to play. What if I don’t want to get down on the floor, or wrestle, or toss balls? I don’t like any of those things. As my son was growing up, I often felt too tired and overwhelmed with work and family care to be in the mood for “play.”

Somewhere in this process of creating more space in my life, I’ve started to drop some limiting beliefs about myself – including that I’m too serious and have too much work to play. I also remembered that I like to dance. I took ballet, tap, and jazz with my sister from age 2 until I hit puberty and felt like I didn’t have a “dancer’s body” to continue with lessons.

Like everything, play is a feeling that starts within myself, that moves me – in this case, to dance with my laundry.