Word: homespuns
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...whiff of disingenuousness clings to him. He has chosen homespun robes, he says, because they make "the most sense" and help avoid a textile industry that "enslaves its workers." Still, living much as Jesus did--declining money and subsisting on charity--is key to winning supportive friends. Says Connie Muir, whose daughter and son-in-law housed him for two months last fall: "He speaks to the deepest part of your soul." And Joseph sees possibilities in this land of shuttered mines. "There's a faith waiting to come out. It's like a beautiful heart is under there...
...experiments that sometimes came near to killing him. He eschewed all spices as a discipline of the senses. He napped every day with a mud poultice on abdomen and brow. He was so insistent on absolute regularity in his daily regimen that he safety-pinned a watch to his homespun dhoti, synchronized with the clock at his ashram. He scheduled his bowel movements for 20 minutes morning and afternoon. "The bathroom is a temple," he said, and anyone was welcome to chat with him there. He had a cleansing enema every night...
Every afternoon, Gandhi did an hour or two of spinning on his little handwheel, sometimes 400 yards at a sitting. "I am spinning the destiny of India," he would say. The thread went to make cloth for his followers, and he hoped his example would convince Indians that homespun could free them from dependence on foreign products. But the real point of the spinning was to teach appreciation for manual labor, restore self-respect lost to colonial subjugation and cultivate inner strength...
...Twain, essentially invented the plain but supple American prose style, carefully composed to sound casual. So, to stress the point that "high blueberries" must be looked for in swamps, Thoreau writes, "When I see their dense curving tops ahead, I expect a wet foot." He dresses his adages in homespun: "All kinds of harvestry, even pulling turnips when the first cold weather numbs your fingers, are interesting if you have been the sower and have not sowed too many...
...AUTHOR PLUG:] "I wanted to dislodge that image of me being homespun...