The enforced time away afforded quite an opportunity to gain some perspective on how our work shapes, contributes to, and informs our very human being.
There are lots of ways to clean out a closet. Partly, it depends on what is in the closet. Per my earlier post about freecycle, I think that part of the practice of sauca or cleanliness, is making sure that the hidden parts of our homes are not overfilled with stuff we do not use. Cleaning out the closet, does not mean throwing everything out. It can mean creatively rethinking where things should be and how we should use them. It also means for every artist, cook, crafts person, periodically making use of all those things you picked up or saved because they would be of use in something.
I was raised to save things that possibly could be used later, and to try and make every scrap usable. I was taught this because my father was born in 1929 and my mother in 1936 of Jewish peasant immigrants. Now, we are re-learning how to maximize the use of objects and minimize waste for ecological, rather than financial reasons, though the two are inextricably intertwined. As the recession progresses, it will be interesting to see whether financial constriction will foster more environmentally conscious living.
About four years ago, when I was engaged in a periodic review of what was in the hall closet, I came upon my big box of leftover yarn. In the late eighties and early nineties, I traveled extensively for business, and spent many hours in airports and evenings in hotels. I found it comforting to have a lapful of mohair, homespun, or other delicious to touch yarn. Airport security was less invasive, and it was possible to knit in the airport and take knitting needles on board the airplane. As I love working with multiple colors, that resulted in a leftover skeins from each project. Over a 10-15 year period, even with only a couple of aborted projects and no yarn bought for imagined future projects (unlike a really serious knitter), I ended up with enough yarn for a queen-sized blanket (shocking, really). As you can see, I designed it like a crazy quilt. It took an educated sense of color and line — imagine this as a painting or pastel and you can see the influence of the Washington Color School, but it did not require much in the way of knitting skills (the whole blanket knit in panels of “mistake rib” — (k2, p2), end k2, p1 — about 50,000 times). The patch of fire engine red and the grape juice purple next to it, came from my friend Sara, who is a fabulously talented knitter. I felt the need for those colors, so we swapped for some of the teal and green that I had.
The blanket took almost four years to knit because I only did it in fits and starts. Finally, last year, I decided that I needed to finish it in time for Becky be able to curl up on it. As you can see, she thinks it is great. Now my closet is not stuffed with a big box of yarn, I have an extra warm blanket that helps me keep the house just a little cooler, I made a thing of beauty where I might have been tempted to go out and buy something new, and Becky has a new happy spot.
I’m attending via the Internet a year-long series of lectures through the Upaya Zen Center about Socially Engaged Buddhism. On the honor system (the program consists only of watching zoom or YouTube lectures and a Facebook forum with no interaction with any leading the program other than group emails), as part of the year, we are supposed to have a “social engagement” project informed by Buddhist principles of right living.
Social engagement as an intrinsic element of spiritual practice/observation seems completely consistent with the principle of Quaker practice I was raised with —that of putting one’s faith and recognition that there is good in every being—into how one lives and works. It also resonates with my understanding of the yoga practice of seva (“selfless” service), which I have tried to make a consistent part of my personal yoga sadhana.
After much intentional and spaciously open contemplation of this exhortation to have a project, and in response to my listening to the lectures and the questions and observations of others listening to the the program, I came to the conclusion that, actually, I could not take on another thing without it being toxic to myself.
In fact, after 30 committed years, I’ve given notice of my intent to retire from the Federal civil service at the end of the year. I am also doing less volunteer work than I had been prior to the pandemic. For the rest of the year, I am continuing my concerted efforts to share my experience and knowledge to make sure my co-workers are prepared to take on the responsibilities for the complex project that has been largely my responsibility to lead and coordinate for over a decade. That, along with what it is taking for a mindful emergence from pre-vaccine pandemic living, is taking all the energy I can give and still be healthy.
I continue to budget to make reparations, to speak out, and make other consistent offerings, but am at last releasing the need for measurable accomplishments, rather than feeling compelled to find or produce more.
As saying that I am doing what I have already been doing has not seemed sufficiently responsive, and after these months of trying to articulate what I mean in a way that would not sound dismissive of the task, I wrote this haiku:
This is my project:
Be kinder to myself and
Also to others.
PS It is, I am sure, just a coincidence that it is Bastille Day.
PPS Get out the vote!
“For him who is moderate in food and play, moderate in performing actons, moderate in sleep and waking, for him is the yoga which destroys sorrow.” Bhagavad Gita, 6.18 (trans. Gitartha Samgraha, in Abhinavagupta’s Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita).
Food here, of course, is more than what we put into our mouth. It is everything that comes in through the senses. Play, too, is beyond what we do for “fun” in this society. How much these words have kept their truth since written; what different meanings they carry in our time of technological marvels. What does “moderation” mean to us? Does moderation have an implicit relativeness?
Since I first read the Gita in high school, I have been contemplating this sloka and resonating with it. Now, I come back to it over and over again, as my understanding of the rest of the text deepens and my practice grows. It is still giving me food for thought. (Pun intended).
As I walk around the neighborhood seeing all the pumpkins on stoops, like Proust with his madeleines, I remember the scent of roasting pumpkin seeds and the salty taste on my tongue, and I return to the place of my childhood. My mother wasn’t much for holidays, but she very much enjoyed arts and crafts projects. The jack-o-lantern, was something then that showed up when we were little kids. I don’t think there was ever a jack-o-lantern carved when we did not eat the seeds. Part of the project was cleaning the seeds, oiling a cookie sheet, spreading the seeds out on the sheet, salting them, and roasting them until golden, and then enjoying the seeds as a special salty treat. I think it unlikely she has decorated a pumpkin at home since I was in early elementary school, but if she were to do it now, in addition to roasting the pumpkin seeds, I am sure she would decorate the outside instead of cutting it into a jack-o-lantern, so that the pumpkin could also be used for soup or pie.
It is a fine thing to reminded to love, but for the most part fruitless to be commanded to love a certain thing or person.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Flash-roasted Brussels sprouts and spiced egg broken in butter
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Magnificent photo, Elizabeth!