I believe that anything in life can be turned into a mediation. Any mundane job or task, if we allow ourselves to be fully present there, can reveal chards of insight. Like an artist creating a mosaic, we can take all of the broken, seemingly misshapen pieces of our life and gather them together into something strikingly beautiful and utterly unique. When we look at our life in this way we can let go of the perfectionism that limits and paralyzes us, and instead allow our path to meander. Our job is simply to take our beautiful broken peices, the chards of our experience, and create a footpath with them as we go along.
I have been working on putting in a flagstone patio at my next-door neighbor's house. I had mentioned a while back that I really wanted to buy myself a pottery wheel and that I would do almost anything within reason to get it. A short while later my neighbor approached me saying that she would be delighted to pay me if I would help her daughter put in a patio for her. My first reaction was to say, "But I have never done that before! I have no idea what I'm doing!" Her reaction was just a simple calm smile. She said, in her native Minnasoten accent, "OOh, I'm not worried about that at all. You girls will figure it out. And I know you'll do a great job." She had seen all the amateur landscaping we had done and liked it. Add to that her generally wonderful feminist perspective, and we had a deal. We gathered all the DIY instructions, talked to some landscaping folks, and just started in.
The hardest part of this kind of project is in preparing the foundation. We had to cut the sod, pull it up, till the soil, dig up and move countless wheelbarrows of dirt, measure, level, and measure again. I'm not at all a mathematically or spatially minded person...I'm a right-brain English major type all the way. So I have more than a bit of a hard time moving from calculations to application. Inch by inch, bit by bit, we figured it out. After 3 hours of hard work this morning, we are finally ready to bring in the gravel. We're ready to lay the bedrock in which we will nestle our flagstones--arranging them like chards in a mosaic, gathering together their oddly-shaped edges to form a beautiful patio.
Fred Rogers, "Mr. Rogers", said, "It's not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life that ultimately nourish our souls. It's the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is firm." Making sure that bedrock is firm is no easy, clean, or straightforward task. It requires that we wrestle with self-doubt, sweat, get very dirty, know when to ask for help, keep our body nourished while we work, know when to take breaks, and just plain do a lot of heavy lifting. Even before we embark on this journey, though, it often takes someone or something nudging us out of our comfort zone, smiling when we bodly claim we can't do it, and offering us a vision of what is possible.
Anything can be a meditation. Anyone can be a vessel of the Spirit's nudging. Leonard Cohen once said, "Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in." Gather up your broken pieces, your chards of insight, your misshapen edges. Love yourself, trust yourself, laugh at yourself, and go make something beautiful!
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