How we do anything is how we do everything.
An awareness I’ve tethered myself to. There’s empowerment in the simple accountability how engineers, it organizes what is otherwise psychic chaos.
(A special emphasis on the chaos existing,
regardless.)
I’m starting to believe it’s not just me, that we all have an over-accumulation of psychic debris.
Rooted in unoriginality.
I’ve found the best way to get inside how I do everything is to do one thing, a simple thing, done simply, with minimal distraction and invested presence. And in doing that one simple thing pay mindful attention to how I am doing it, with a softness of inquiry and curiosity.
The how is in the chaos, the mental chatter.
The preconditioned beliefs and meaning-making alway happening.
The how is where I get tripped up, which is why the softness is required. Inept of softness I perpetuate and build momentum with incessant and unproductive self depreciation.
Also, through intimacy with how is where the magic of alchemy happens.
I get tripped before the magic.
That’s the how in everything for me.
Mr. Miyagi teaches Daniel son this principle with paint and wax.
Miguel Ruiz teaches this concept in his 4th agreement, which he calls doing your best, a skillset that requires the awareness of how things are done.
Zen Koan taught this through ancient, and yet still contemporary (at least for me), survivalist chores.
“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.”
The key to everything is that everything is chopping wood and carrying water, in doing one thing mindfully, everything is done mindfully, then it is all the same.
How we do anything is how we do everything.
I’ve found value in mundane labor-intensive chores, enough to choose into a laborious lifestyle, chopping wood and carrying water.
Wood is our main source of heat, and high elevations mean snow, which means shoveling sometimes 6-7 full months of the year here. Chop wood, carry water.
I could be living an ‘easier’ lifestyle, one less dependent on physical labor for literal warmth and function, but I’m not, and every year I get to rediscover why.
Chopping wood is actually just like grocery shopping, (albeit far more laborious).
We drive to the grocery, scout just the right products that get loaded into the cart we are pushing around, only to be pulled out of said cart onto a belt that crosses a scanner, after which we bag the products and reload them into the cart to push out to the car, pull them out of the cart and load into the car, make the drive home and unload all those groceries from the car into fridges, freezers, cabinets and pantries. Eventually we pull those products out of those places to recipe into conglomerates of edible fuel to be consumed.
I’ve been known to say “I hate grocery shopping” so there’s the how, the chaos, the resistance to things, the suffering.
In the fall we leave our mountain home to scout just the right honey hole of standing dead trees, the lumberjack and our sons take on the treacherous task of falling those tree’s and slicing them into strategically sized stumps, I work to carry those stumps to the trailer where I attempt to stack them strategically (often with help thankfully). Then the trailer goes back down the mountain, where it’s unloaded and re-stacked in a random place on our property where it waits for nearly a year, crackling as it releases what remnants of life are held within it.
In the spring we split the previous year's cut and load it into the split-wood barn, a replenishing of energy and a preparation for the coming year.
This all sounds far easier than it is.
Several trailer loads per season come home in order to produce enough heat for our little house through the long Woodland winter. It takes a full 8-10 hour work day to get 1 trailer load cut, loaded, and unloaded.
During the winter we haul from the split wood barn, around 5 wood barrel loads per week, the fuel necessary to produce the heat needed.
It’s ancient and modern at the same time,
and akin to contemporary food acquisition .
I get into how I do everything when I look at how I participate in the simple task of carrying wood (my simple but laborious part in this process), through mindfulness while doing.
I notice the resistance, evidentiary in the physical fatigue that sets in, and then I work to soften into curiosity, which leans introspective and gleans discovery. It’s a witness and organization of the chaos.
It’s revelatory.
The speed at which I gain clarity is variable, based on circumstances and conditions while also being pre-determined by grounded-ness, and practice.
Since our recent wood acquisition weekend I’ve been listening to the crackling of the stack in the side yard and contemplating one specific thing that has been sitting with me from just a few stumps in; there is valuable life giving energy in what is done living, in what is dead.
Death is fuel.
How will this change how I perceive and resource what has died in my life?
Relationships are first to mind.
Connections to my own species lost begin to come alive even in their death.
How we do anything is how we do everything.