The Clean House

“Love isn’t [clean.]. It’s dirty. Like a good joke.”  

When I’m stressed, I tend to clean. I struggle to get things done when I know the chaos of the world has infiltrated my house, and find myself in peak moments of stress throwing a load of laundry in, or deep cleaning the baseboards. The more powerless I feel about the world outside, the more I try to “order the universe” of my home. There are seasons in life when we can comfortably keep the mess under control. However, in our most vulnerable seasons of change and growth, the messiness becomes impossible to contain, and we are faced with the task of navigating through it. 

Grief is messy. Love is messy. Family is messy. But, the mess is the price we pay for belonging. We cannot love and control at the same time. We’ve all come from a mess and we all have our own relationship to it. It’s both hilarious and heartbreaking to learn to embrace the chaos of our existence and it takes a lot of discomfort to rethink the overly simple, clean–cut boxes we try to put others in. Human beings aren’t simple. We are full of both the ordinary and the divine. And as this play suggests, a sense of humor regarding this reality is far more powerful than our attempts to control it. 

For the next 90 minutes, you have permission to be a mess. To judge too quickly, and realize you were wrong. To miss home and everything that was familiar to you. To giggle at dirty jokes and to laugh in the face of death. I hope this play gives you a minute to be okay with the mess. May we all embrace the absolute disaster it is being alive. May we always choose to laugh at our humanity.