Striking Ordinariness

There was a moment, tonight, when I was sitting with my friend in our Fellowship, and he kicked his cup of coffee by accident. It spilled over the floor, and very quickly I got up, went to the kitchen, got some towels, came back, and cleaned it up while our meeting continued.

There was something about that activity, though, that was so... so precious.

Maybe this sounds crazy, but it was perfect. Beautiful. There was no thought involved. I wasn't angry with him because he had spilled his coffee, and I wasn't trying to 'prove' myself with service by cleaning up after him. I just enjoyed the act of cleaning up the coffee, wiping until it had been sopped up by the towels and then disposing of them properly.

I wish all things, everything, could be like that.

I think of the Zen saying "chop wood, carry water"... and how wonderful just the simple acts in life are. I remember, a while back, when I discovered how wonderful it was to do the dishes, to feel the warm and hot and soapy water, to learn how to apply just the right amount of pressure to scrape the pan without hurting it, smelling the water and the soap scents, feeling the little aches in my feet and back... folding laundry while it's still warm... bathing a dog.

So much of life now, it seems, is lived in the head. We spend time thinking. We spend time talking. Less and less do we go about simple daily tasks with simple daily rewards to them, like making the bed, taking out the garbage. We don't do these things any more, really.

The more I think about it, though, it's precisely in those things that the joy lies. It always has been that way; I just never looked for it.

So here's my dream: to have a job I leave at work. No working my job at home.

To have a garden to tend, dirt for my fingers to dig in.

A kitchen where food is prepared, cooked, recycled.

To make beds, clean dishes, fold warm laundry. Listen to the radio.

Clean up coffee spills.

Think less about complicated things. Center my mind on the simpler bits of living, like food.

I'm tired of high-falutin'.

I want to sweep.

When Others Get In the Way

I went, today, to go drop off a book at YCC, a youth alternative-corrections house. One of my boys has had serious depression lately, mostly tied up with the fact that he's stuck in a youth alternative-corrections house and the woman he loves is in the outside world. So I bought him When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, since he's not going to be getting out of his situation any time soon and he needs to learn how to be comfortable in that situation, how to handle all that fear and anger and sadness and put it to good use.

I began walking up to the house, when a guy, who obviously worked there, came up. He said that we shouldn't just stop by any more, because it disrupted the schedule for the kids who were in there: their days were highly scheduled, and when we stopped by it caused all sorts of problems.

I said "OK", and then explained that I was just stopping by to drop off a book. He told me everything had to be screened, which I said was fine; I didn't want or need to see my boy, I just wanted to drop off a book. It's not like I was looking to smuggle drugs or something else in to him.

Just then a larger-looking black woman came walking up hurriedly, purposefully, angrily. She then said, in a low but furious voice, that we were not allowed to come back, ever. Not just to not stop by, but ever - at least, that's what it sounded like, though I'm hoping such is not the case.

This seems to be a theme, lately. I find myself in situations where I'm just looking to be helpful. To the best of my knowledge I'm being quiet, kind, polite. I'm not being gruff or stepping on anyone's toes, I'm just there, trying to help, be helpful, aid others to live their lives. And I'm greeted with anger, intolerance, bitterness, usually not by the recipient but rather by someone peripheral, someone indirectly involved.

My training, what I've been taught, is to look for causes, to move as quickly as possible towards compassion. Responding to anger with anger, to intolerance with intolerance, only exacerbates the situation and causes it to escalate into something bigger, more annoying. In this particular situation, the best I could come up with is burn-out. Most of the people working at YCC seem to be suffering from massive burn-out, which is understandable: I wouldn't want to work in that sort of capacity, with young criminals, all the idiocy of teenagers with all the stupidity of criminal behavior with all the cretinism of drug-and/or-alcohol abuse.

But lately I seem to have difficulty dragging up the required compassion, or at least understanding. I look around, and it seems as if people make heavy going of life, make it heavier and more of a pain-in-the-ass than it truly needs to be. And this goes especially when someone is trying to help - I'm trying to help a kid to get along better with others, encouraging him to cooperate with and respect authorities, to lead a better life.

I still don't know how to handle such situations. I know that, at some point, a situation will arise where I need to help, but someone is in the way, angry. Do I put my foot down? Do I become more forceful? Or do I back off?

I don't know.