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February 23, 1998
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It's just an ordinary Monday. I heard Charles Siebert talking about his new book, Wickerby, on The Connection and thought it sounded interesting, sort of an anti-Thoreauvian sojourn in the woods. After spending a long time catching up on my journal entries, I dropped off the roll of film that I finished yesterday and spent the waiting time at Andover Bookstore reading from Wickerby. I decided not to buy it immediately because I am so far behind in my reading I think I'll never catch up. I did manage to finish Close to the Machine, and I'm now alternating between Doris Kearns Goodwin's Wait 'til Next Year, which Charla gave me for [insert name of December holiday here], and Rory Nugent's The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck.. Vastly different from each other. I'm hoping to get my reading chops back soon and be able to plow through books at at least a book-a-week clip. After the bookstore sojourn, I picked up the pictures and came back home to finish up yesterday's entry. Gotta git me one o' them thar digital camera thingies if I'm a-gonna get this journal caught up in a timely fashion - waiting to finish a 36 exposure roll of film is ridiculous in today's fast-paced environment. Why the entire web's technology could be obsolete before the the film is developed. The latest issue of Tricycle came today and as I flipped through it, Louise Rafkin's article on the Japanese sect where toilet cleaning is considered a path to self-knowledge leaped out at me. This intrigues me because when I first started on this sabbatical adventure I deliberately sought out physical, humble, work that I thought would allow me to maintain mindfulness while I did it. Litterbox washing is for me an antidote to the 22 years of brain work in high-tech. The first year I worked at MRFRS I paid careful attention to each cage and litterbox I cleaned - maintaining mindfulness of what I was doing, whose cage it was, what it felt like... and I did get glimmering's of the feeling I was looking for - direct experience of the interconnection of all things and the feeling of being in life not outside observing it. I kind of lost that part of the experience after the management consultant came in and told Stacey to run it more like a business. That was when the pressure to work faster started and we all started having anxiety about being done on time. For me the focus on the schedule and the deadline distracted me from focusing on the task. I was no longer "Washing dishes to wash dishes" as Thich Nhat Hahn describes it. I was suddenly washing dishes in order to have clean dishes and litterboxes by 11:00 AM. In recent months, the only time I've felt that sense of being completely in the present moment was when I was walking down the road where the bus had gotten stuck on our search for the daphniphyllum. The snow was starting to melt and the sasa leaves that had been weighted down by it were springing up all over the place and I was totally alive to it, noticing each suddenly freed leaf as if it were an animal that had scampered out of its winter hiding place. The melting snow made a wonderful tinkling sound as it ran down the mountain in an impromptu creek. I was practicing walking meditation without even intending to do so, I just did it. I don't get that feeling often enough lately. I've become jaded to the experience of not being in an office, wearing a suit, surrounded by people who want something from me yesterday. When I first quit the high tech work force - or jumped off the cliff into the abyss - everything was new to me. It was easy to pay attention. I noticed the faces of the parents picking up their kids at school when I'd be waiting to pick up Andrea and Elizabeth. I memorized the layout and decor of Mrs. Reed's sitting room with its print of a tumble down building on Block Island over the fireplace and a fading print of Audubon's famous painting of wood ducks on the side wall. I noticed everything. Then at some point all this became routine and I went on auto-pilot. I needed the Japan trip to shake me out of the zombie-like one foot in front of the other march through the days. But even that didn't keep me awakened. I keep drifting back into this kind of half-sleep where I can do things without attention. I need to rearrange my routine, shake things up. It's good to notice when a groove has become a rut :-) | |
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