For the last quarter century plus my home has been a “hermitage” just outside the ZMPC. Hermitage is in quotes so people don’t picture one of the ones folks stay in while visiting the Monastery. It’s about twice as large, has running water, and electricity. The point of this conversation is that, by most standards in the so-called “developed world,” it’s very small.
Periodically through the years I would fall for internal scams along the lines of, “It would be nice to work somewhere other than at the kitchen table,” and I would start a redesigning process. At one point I went so far as to convert the carport into an office. It never took. It was just too far away. Back I would migrate to the kitchen table. Happy.
Now I find myself in what is for me a giant house—the future Zen Monastery main building. Two floors, three bathrooms, five or so bedrooms depending on how you count the rooms… Just way too much. Slowly I’ve closed off room after room. When the snow and cold hit, it just made no sense at all to heat enormous spaces I had no use for. Even the office—with the magnificent view of Grandmother Mountain—began to be too much, just too far away.
There is a point to all this…
As of now, with the exception of my bed, everything I need/use has found its way into the kitchen/living room. (Just like home!) Reconciled to this, delighted to be so pleasantly ensconced, but with a much too small kitchen table for all my needs, I asked my handyguy Mike to make me a simple 4X4 legs, ¾ inch plywood top, 3 feet by 6 ½ feet bench/table. He’s very good and in a tick had come up with a perfectly serviceable surface. Except, he missed the part about cantilevering the two ends out over “indented” legs. I could see it begin to sag in the middle almost immediately. DRAT! When I pointed this out, he couldn’t see it. I, not having access to a 6-foot level, could not make my case. But I could see the sag. How could it not? The span is just too great. I tried, I really did, not to see the growing sag, but I could not.
Here’s my point…
It was like the proverbial burr under the saddle blanket. Okay, maybe not quite that bad, but it just kept grabbing my attention. Could I have ignored it? I suppose. But it just wasn’t okay. It wasn’t respectful. This wood had once been a tree. It was now here with me, giving to me. I needed to take care of it, honor it, respect it. What to do? I don’t need to nag Mike. He can’t see it. It’s not his experience. Fortunately, I have a sort-of-sharp handsaw (oh, how I miss that fully-stocked Monastery woodshop), and I have a 2X4! Off to the garage to make a little support for the lovely table/bench. Now, it’s level. Now—yes, I’m projecting—it’s happy. It feels loved.
Is there a larger point here? Seems so to me. A day is full of these kinds of moments. The things we don’t quite finish, are in too much of a hurry to complete fully. And, they niggle at us. It takes energy from us when we’re not in integrity. And, that’s what it is—being out of integrity. As we learned via Braiding Sweetgrass, we must take care of the ones who take care of us. If we don’t, perhaps it won’t be “they” who suffer, but surely, sooner or later, it will be us.
For those of us prioritizing living in the moment, I suspect this comes down to “address it when it appears.” It drops in to conscious awareness, and the fact that it drops in is our signal that now is the time to attend. Of course, we can ignore it. Ego voices would argue that there are so many of those things dropping in that attending to them would be all a person would be able to do—which is the point! It can be inspiring to keep in mind that not attending to those burrs means they remain as burrs. Perhaps one definition of suffering is “an accumulation of burrs.”
All Purpose Surface
The time has come to start the fence project. It’s helpful to have been here long enough to have a sense of what areas we want to fence and where we will need gates. We’ll begin laying it out on Friday and commence the installing as soon as all the snow is melted.
In gasshō,
ch
