Tuesday, August 24, 2010

A guest in our own lives

I am back in the Upper Delaware. Back in the climate where the night breezes are cool and there is relief from the day’s heat. People ask me about the Florida summer and I tell them that I ignored the weather and that the hospital was always cool. In fact, if I had known what I know now, I would have packed more long sleeves rather than the sleeveless dresses that hung in my closet all summer.

And the experience is not without its residual effect, as I have been cleaning and putting away, since I arrived home on Friday.

It was an interesting experience to be a guest in someone’s house for all summer, where one is obliged to put away cookware and empty the dishwasher, to be mindful of a different level of orderliness than that of our own. And I found that I liked the mindfulness, I liked the neat appearance of uncluttered kitchen counters, and a scrubbed and empty sink.

And that is what I am trying to do here for the past four days. Stephen said that he had caught onto my new intention, when I explained to him that I now understood that dish drainers were for drying dishes and not necessarily an ever changing dish shelf.

Today, with cookies (Son Zac is in residence for the next five weeks, while working on a feature film, and that homemade cookie mix from at least three Christmases was crying to be used up), onion broth (I never did use those cute colored mini onions, and it was a choice between the compost heap and onion broth.), white zucchini pizza, zucchini-feta pancakes (to freeze for later use) on the To Do List, the dish washing was rather relentless. (Even though Stephen asked folks to pick the zucchini when he was away for some 10 days, driving me back from Florida, there were some that got away, and the large mini baseball sized zucchini yielded some 10 cups of grated zucchini.)

As I step more fully into a life where we grow more of our own food and live mindfully on these acres, I can see that there is a busyness that is necessary to achieve the intention. And for now, it feels like a coming home, like a coming back to myself.

Thirty-two years ago, I used to make my own bagels, sprouted wheat bread, and my own clothes. I used to have a lot of people to dinner and always cleaned my house in preparation for their arrival.

I don’t know what happened in the meantime. Some might say that I became more relaxed, that I became okay with messiness. But I am unsure that that would be the proper analysis. More apt is that I became tired and a bit overwhelmed with all that was to be done and forgot that my priority is my relationship with myself and my surroundings. For better or for worse, I think that is most easily manifest in how we keep our spaces and how me make time for our family life and relationships.

I know that I am extremely privileged to have this cooling down period to get ready for the next part of my life. But I wonder, isn’t it possible to be focused on that one thing that we want more than anything else. For me, it is a mindful life, of living and creating a calm, peaceful and mindful experience no matter what is happening.

It reminds me of the advice that I gave L. when he was faced being released from the hospital, with nowhere to go, no money, no job, family or friends, that the scope of his situation was too vast to grasp and that the only thing he could do was to find the one thing that was the most important. If he could hold onto that, the rest would fall into place.

For him, it was a powerful addiction that he needed to resist. For me, it’s more simple: I need to treat myself and my surroundings with the same amount of respect that I would if I were a guest.

In one sense, we are all guests on this precious earth. And our lives are actually one holiday, or holy day, after another.

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