We make everything so complicated in our "labor-saving" civilization! I don't wash my own clothes or bedding! I send them to my launderer! The creek is my launderer! I place my clothes, blankets, and sleeping bag in the creek, weighed down by large rocks, leaving them in the water overnight. In the morning I wring them out and spread them on the rocks or on sage-brush bushes or on juniper trees. No soap, no scented dryer sheets, no polluting toxins, no fuss. And my clothes smell earthly-heavenly. Silt sometimes collects on the laundry in the creek. No problem: I just swish the laundry around in the water and the silt goes away. The silt itself is a deodorizing conditioner. This automatic laundromat doesn't get whites very white and doesn't remove some stains. But that's no problem since I wear mostly dark and earth-tone clothes, so such stains don't show. If you look around, white creatures aren't adaptable to the desert. Ravens and coyotes and bobcats and golden eagles are. But, if I may boast, my clothes are cleaner than anybody else's I know of (with the exception of my friend, mentioned below), because they have no synthetic chemical residues with off-gassing ghastly odors. When I'm on the road, I wash clothes in bathroom sinks, park spigots, or in canals or streams. I try to wash socks and my feet every day, so I usually have a clean pair drying and a clean pair on my feet. I do often use soap to wash clothes in civilization. I do have a hermit friend, who lives outdoors in New Mexico, who wears only white linen clothes (which he makes himself), and he lives by a very muddy creek. He refuses to use any soap. He washes his clothes in the clay by the creek and, somehow, they turn out white! He is an impeccably-dressed clean freak, in fact, and will not be caught with stains or stink! |
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"Jesus said, 'don't lie, and don't do what you hate.'" (Gospel of Thomas 6) If you doubt what's in this website, follow this saying, then you'll know whether or not it is true. Aren't lying and doing what you hate one in the same? |
How do you do laundry? |