*
I am happy.
I feel enlivened and energized by our move out to the tiny house and by the various building projects that move entails. Over the weekend I laid the foundation piers for the bathhouse and dug the trench for the gray water drainage and the little leech field- our shower and sink won’t be plumbed into the sewer but will run into a kind of rock-filled trench to drain back into our own water-starved dirt. As long as we don’t run too many showers, and keep all environmentally friendly on our soap we should be fine with this set up. And we’re going to run a composting toilet out there. I’ll keep my fingers crossed on that.
Yesterday I sent the Woman on the Verge on a supply run to the Home Depot for pressure treated lumber and various hardware, so when I got home from work I could knock out a couple of hours of work on the foundation. That Woman did a bang-up job, hauling wood, stacking it in the truck, wrassling it out to the job site, and picking out all the strange hardware to hang joists and whatnot. I’d be lost without her.
Anyhoo. After some head scratching on my part I got her framed out and ready for the deck boards. I am the worst sort of carpenter, I have to admit. I just get an idea of what I want and then I rough it out and go get whatever it occurs to me that I’ll need or think I need and then I pile it up at the site and then start banging shit together. No drawings, no plans. Intuitive construction. I make up for lack of fine-tuned accuracy and pre-planning by over-building everything so at least it won’t ever fall down. I try to make sure everything exceeds whatever code calls for and mostly I do. I’m sure that if anyone who builds stuff for a living ever clapped eyes on what I’ve done they’d be horrified. I’m always a little bit horrified myself. But also pleased. Always that, always happy with the final result. It feels wonderful to have something in the world that was only in your head before. I like that a great deal. And I like all the manly shit, you know, power tools and hammers swinging, blood and sweat and dirt. Sawdust.
After I knocked off I took a shower and then laid on the sofa with old girl and we surfed the intertubes and read for a while and then I went out to the lair and had a good sit. Lit a candle and some incense and watched in silence as the world fell dark around me and the night world came alive. Moonlight and crickets and the merest hint of a sea breeze. A frog hopped across the deck in front of the buddha and disappeared into the brush, barely visible in the shadows, silent.
And sitting there the whole of my being opened up. Opened up to the night all around me, opened up to the vastness of the universe and of time, and the breeze seemed to move through the world and through me without differentiation, as if my body had no solidity, no borders. I sat in a kind of pure awareness and openness and for a while I was simply present. It was a nice feeling.
The instruction is not to attach any importance to what goes on during mediation, not to cling, and this has been a very helpful instruction for me. I think that otherwise I would cling quite quickly to experiences such as that one, to the bliss and openness, and think that there was something important about it, something to try to get to again in my next session. And that can lead to a lot of tension and expectation and can cause you to make a pretty big error in your practice. It’s easy to lose your way chasing after something mystical.
Instead, you treat it just like the thoughts that ceaselessly arise. Notice it, and let it go. Go back to the breath, go back to awareness, go back to the direct experience, not the interpretation of it. The lived experience, not the narrative of it.
Still, those moments are a blessing and I’m grateful for them. They’re not the point, that’s all.
*
And this morning I was up early to do my prayers and sit and watch the show in reverse, the world shifting from darkness to light, the world coming awake. The birds fluttering in the underbrush, eating bugs, lighting on a branch and giving off a little burst of song before shooting off again. The sky growing lighter. The world awake by the time I’ve finished.
And what I’m grateful for this morning is not any of the experiences that this practice has given me, but instead simply for the practice itself. The structure and routine of it, the practice of practice. I’m grateful for it in itself and look forward to living within that practice for the rest of my life. Bringing myself again and again to a place of silence and bare awareness, stripped of all else. Beginning each day with a solemn ceremony of prayer and contemplation, of marshaling and shepherding my compassion and gratitude and small awareness, dedicating myself daily to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. Seeking enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings.
It seems a profoundly good thing.
*
So. Work and practice. Love and commitment. Building up and tearing down. Stillness and action. All things. All things. Opening up to the world exactly as it is. Trying to see it. Trying to see it. Trying to listen. Curious. Attentive.
I read this yesterday, I hadn’t heard it before but it is spot on. From the Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello:
“Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”
*
Exactly so.
***
Namaste, my friends. May you be happy. May you be at peace.
***
The Dishwasher's Tears 
Strangely enough, the title of my own post this morning was “I Am Happy”.
Which struck me as an odd thing to say but it’s simply true. And my happiness derives (today, at least) from the simple loveliness of breeze and flower, of tree and bird and being home. And. From being at peace with that.
Quite completely.
Happiness.
We must acknowledge it when it visits us and make a nice place for it so it will return often.
i’m glad you got back home safe and sound and i’m glad you are happy most of all.
who we were; what we are. i think about this all the time. been working on a new one kinda reminds me of this …without the umlauts. great stuff, scott. how the memories cling to us, despite our wishes to manufacture some new ones.
Jim-
yes, memory inhabits us. like a virus we can’t get shut of.
I’m so glad to get to read your work, brother. You illuminate this world.
With tears welling up, again, I thank you for your writing.
Judy-
thank you. i’m very pleased it brings you some happiness.
Cora is a stunning piece and jolted something in me that is neither happy nor un but that place that art can arc to when nothing else can get in. Practice really is a moment to moment work. I teach my violin students that we practice in order to perfect our practice. That’s my philosophy at least that’s within reach of my accounting for myself. I think very carefully about what you write here. I can’t respond to much of it because it’s so much for me to absorb and my brain lately has been short circuited. But i’ll come back to it and then come back to it again. I trust you because you admit to being so utterly human and that’s what makes you beautiful that’s what makes you lovable. I sound rambly and anxious. I feel rambly and anxious. But I know what I know and your art is an inescapable presence in my life and I missed it awful much when it wasn’t here for me to feast on.
Rebecca
I’m glad you like Cora. Glad you like any of my work. It makes me happy.
I think the thing for me, one of the things, that this path has that engenders my trust is the appreciation of diligent work towards the goal. How that it is the work itself, not the product of the work, that makes the change happen. You don’t become a musician because you play beautiful music but because you work at music, you bring yourself to it again and again, rain and shine, drop of blood by drop of blood, over the course of an entire lifetime. That’s what makes beautiful music, beautiful anything, happen.
I’m sorry your brain is fucked and you feel rambly and anxious. I know anxious, I know that one cold. I dislike it the most. Rather be laid low.
I been reading but not commenting because I don’t know what all to say and I know I know that you can feel me there whatever I say or neglect to say. So.
A goddamn Vivian girl tattoo? Girl you beat the whole world is what.
love, love, love.
yrs-
Scott
Thank you for the evocation in your last post of joy and grief making out like teenagers; it’s where I live lately, and it’s painfully sublime. And this post, the reminder to be just as unattached to the joy as to the sorrow, to welcome both like honored guests, I needed that.
I missed you when you were gone. Like a child I was not yet ready to trust that you won’t go away again. So I have been holding back. How silly it seems now. Of course you will go away again. But you are here now. And I am grateful to be able to read you again and be provoked by your art.
Angella-
Well, I probably deserve a little bit of the silent treatment after my long absence. No hard feelings there. And you’re right, I’m sure I will go away again. But thank you for coming back around, despite my unreliable nature. Your friendship means a great deal to me, this community of intimate strangers means a lot to me, and I can feel how much love and support we provide each other. I think it’s wonderful and a real source of blessings.
I know that things are very hard for you right now, and that you’re also showered with love and amazing blessings from your whole family. I applaud your strength and your great big good heart.
Thank you so much for being my friend.
yrs-
Scott
The practice of practice. Exactly. My daughter, who can’t speak or move, has been diligently striving to teach me this for 33 years.
I cannot even begin to fathom how difficult, how relentless, how profound your practice with your daughter must be for you. I will keep both of you in my prayers.
Thank you for sharing. Thank you for coming by and being a part of this place.
yrs-
Scott
I had this experience today although I didn’t articulate it nearly as well as you did. Or perhaps my “practice” was not quite that, although the thought crossed my mind that living in the present, noticing the present has its own sort of tyranny once it occurs to you that it must be done. Does that make sense?
I don’t know, Elizabeth, I think you articulated it beautifully. You certainly took me into that moment with your writing.
I don’t know about the tyranny of the present moment, it doesn’t feel quite like that to me. It lacks that sense of cruel despotism I guess. I find the present moment to be wonderfully accommodating but not particularly concerned about my attentions to it. It does just fine without me. Not the other way round, though. Maybe you mean it from that angle? Like, we need it. Need it. Need it bad.
The nice thing is, it is always, always, always available to us. We just need to shut up for a second, take a deep breath, and open up to it.
What I love about the present moment is that it always feels complete and whole, it seems to lack nothing and possess everything it could ever need. Everything I could ever need.
It’s nice to spend time there.
I’m grateful, as always, for your presence here.