From Robert Johnson's "We"

In Robert Johnson’s We, he adds that many years ago a wise friend gave him the name for human love.  She called it “stirring-the-oatmeal” love.  Within this phrase, if we humble ourselves enough to look, is the very essence of what human love is, and it shows us the principle differences between human love and romance.  Stirring the oatmeal is a humble act—not exciting or thrilling.  But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth.  It represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple tasks:  earning a living, living within a budget, putting out the garbage, feeding the baby in the middle of the night.  To “stir the oatmeal” means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty, in simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity to everything.  Like the rice hulling of the Zen monks, the spinning wheel of Ghandi, the tent making of Saint Paul, it represents the discovery of the sacred in the middle of the humble and ordinary.