Interesting Read: Do Dishes, Rake Leaves (And Don't Forget the Endless Loads of Laundry)

Blogger Note: This article from Shambhala Sun magazine, written by Zen practitioner Karen Maezen Miller, is a down to earth exploration of mindfulness in everyday life. She says some things that really resonated with me. In years past, I think I often fell in the habit of viewing day-to-day tasks like washing the dishes, working in the yard, and doing the laundry as a distraction from more meaningful or "spiritual" activities like practicing yoga, meditating, writing, creating art, etc. As I've matured a little bit and entered into a living situation with my girlfriend Jaime, I've grown to see that there is actually a lot of joy to be found in simple, household tasks and that there doesn't need to be a line drawn between the "spiritual life" and the "ordinary life". I guess I'll get an even better opportunity to put this idea to the test when Jaime & I stay in Yellowstone this summer and work in the kitchen. Maybe I'll write a book on the subject someday... The Tao of Dishwashing :) ~ Matt

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Do Dishes, Rake Leaves (And Don't Forget the Endless Loads of Laundry)

Karen Maezen Miller on how the domestic practice of ancient Zen masters can lead us to intimate encounters with our own lives.

I have a garden in my backyard, and even if you don’t call it a garden, you do too. In the fall, the broad canopy of giant sycamores in my backyard turns faintly yellow and the leaves sail down. First by ones, and then by tons. A part of every autumn day finds me fuming at the sight of falling leaves. Then, I pick up a rake.

Tell me, while I’m sweeping leaves till kingdom come, is it getting in the way of my life? Is it interfering with my life? Keeping me from my life? Only my imaginary life, that life of what-ifs and how-comes: the life I’m dreaming of.

At the moment that I’m raking leaves, at the moment I’m doing anything, it is my life, it is all of time, and it is all of me.

In the spring, the garden bursts to life and once again I see what time it is. It is time to weed. When I look up across the endless stretch of the job before me, I surely want to quit. But if I manage to regain my focus on what’s at hand I realize it’s just one weed. There’s always just one weed to do next. I do it weed by weed, and the weeds always show me how. I never finish.

Looking for greater meaning in life, some people think that housework is beneath them. Cooking and cleaning are beneath them. I know that feeling well. Sometimes they seem so far beneath me that I can’t see the bottom. I can’t see the beginning or the end. Is there a point to doing the work that seems pointless? The work with no visible end, no redeeming value, and no apparent urgency? Yes. It’s the wisdom of the ancient homemakers.

After Buddhism came to China, the Chan school replaced the tradition of itinerant alms-begging with communal living. It was practical, for one thing. And it was practice. Monastic training came to encompass all the work essential to everyday life—cleaning, cooking, and gardening—as well as meditation. For that reason we could well view the great Chinese masters as our progenitors in mindful homemaking, since many of their teachings point directly to the everyday chores we might rather high-mindedly neglect.

A monk asked Joshu, “All dharmas are reduced to oneness, but what is oneness reduced to?” Joshu said, “When I was in Seishu I made a hempen shirt. It weighed seven pounds.”

More than a thousand years have passed since Joshu gave that response, originating one of the many classic koans that recount his provocative teachings. To this day seekers are still struggling to find a way out of the shirt. What does it mean? What is he getting at? I don’t understand!

We don’t just struggle with a shirt in a Zen koan. We struggle with the shirts in our hampers. With the pants, the blouses, the sheets, and the underwear. Laundry presents a mountainous practice opportunity because it provokes a never-ending pile of egocentric resistance.

It’s not important to me. It’s tedious. I don’t like to do it!

The monk in this story is like the rest of us, seeking wisdom through intellectual inquiry. If we’re not careful, this is how we approach mindfulness: as an idea, one we rather like, to elevate our lives with special contemplative consideration, a method for making smarter choices and thereby assuring better outcomes. The problem is that the life before us is the only life we have. The search for meaning robs our life of meaning, sending us back into our discursive minds while right in front of us the laundry piles up.

In his commentary on this koan, the late teacher and translator Katsuki Sekida rinsed Joshu’s shirt clear of obfuscation. “Joshu’s words remind us of the keen sensibilities of people who lived in the days when things were made by hand. The seven pounds of hemp was woven into cloth and cut and sewn into a shirt. When Joshu put on his hempen shirt, he experienced a sensation that was the direct recognition of the shirt for what it was.”

The shirt, you see, is just a shirt. Feel the fabric, the weave, and the weight of seven pounds in your hands. The laundry is just the laundry. Pull it out of the hamper, sort by color and fabric, read the care instructions, and get on it with it. Transcending obstacles and overcoming preferences, we have an intimate encounter with our lives every time we do the wash. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but no one turns their nose up at a clean pair of socks.

With only a change in perspective, the most ordinary things take on inexpressible beauty. When we don’t know, we don’t judge. And when we don’t judge, we see things in a different light. That is the light of our awareness, unfiltered by intellectual understanding, rumination, or evaluation. When we cultivate nondistracted awareness as a formal practice, we call it mindfulness meditation. When we cultivate it in our home life, we call it the laundry, the kitchen, or the yard—all the places and the ways to live mindfully by attending without distraction to whatever appears before us. But it’s hard for mus to believe that attention is all there is to it, and so we complicate things with our judgment—debasing the ordinary as insignificant and idealizing the spiritual as unattainable—never seeing that the two are one.

A monk said to Joshu, “I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me.” “Have you eaten your rice porridge?” asked Joshu. “Yes, I have,” replied the monk. “Then you had better wash your bowl,” said Joshu.

This famous koan is easy to view as a metaphor. Empty your mind and get rid of your notions of spiritual attainment. But suppose you don’t view the bowl as a metaphor? That might change the way you look at the dishes in your kitchen sink and instruct you just as thoroughly.

The kitchen is not only the heart of a home, it can also be the heart of our mindfulness practice. In cooking and cleaning, we move beyond ourselves and into compassionate care of everything and everyone around us.

Eating is our sole essential consumption and cooking is our one common charity, so you’d think its purpose would be obvious. Yet with a critical eye to the value of time and what we judge to be our higher talents, meal preparation may seldom seem worth it. Cooking for two? Not worth it. Filling the fridge? Not worth it. Sitting to dine? Not worth it. Cleaning up after? Not worth it.

Nothing is worth the measure we give it, because worth doesn’t really exist. It is a figment of our judging minds, an imaginary yardstick to measure the imaginary value of imaginary distinctions, and one more way we withhold ourselves from the whole enchilada of life that lies before us.

If nothing is worth it, why cook? Why shop and chop, boil and toil and clean up after? To engage yourself in the marvel of your own being. To see the priceless in the worthless. To find complete fulfillment in being unfilled. And to eat something other than your own inflated self-importance. That’s what we empty when we empty the bowl, and a busy kitchen gives us the chance to empty ourselves many times a day.

A monk asked Joshu, “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming to China?” Joshu said, “The oak tree in the garden.”

Enough about laundry and dishes, you might be thinking, what about the deep spiritual questions? Why do the great mystics strive so diligently for enlightenment if it has no more depth than what’s found in ordinary housework?

See beyond your house, Joshu answers, beyond the delusion of a separate self trapped by the false perception of what is inside and what is outside. This is true mindfulness: not the narrow boundaries of our conceptual abode, but the phenomenal world of the awakened mind. Joshu tells us to open our eyes and awaken in our own backyard.

Once again, Sekida prunes the intellectual interpretation that can obscure our clear sight. “There were many giant oaks in the garden of Joshu’s temple. We can well imagine that Joshu himself was personally familiar with every tree, stone, flower, weed, and clump of moss—as intimately acquainted as if they were his own relatives.”

Where is the place you know as well as your own family? Indeed, that is as proximate as yourself? It is the place where where you are at ease with a full load, fulfilled by an empty sink, telling time by the leaves and weeds: making yourself mindfully at home in the home you never leave.

From the March 2010 issue of the Shambhala Sun.

Karen Maezen Miller is a priest at the Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles and the author of Momma Zen. Her next book, Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life, will be published this spring. She also blogs for the Shambhala Sun.

The Wisdom of Doing Nothing

Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
~ Basho

Of all the fears that terrorize the human heart, perhaps the greatest is the fear of nothing. It is the concept that none of us want to deal with: non-existence - the terror that everything we believe ourselves to be will one day disappear, that everything we know and love will be gone, forever, on the day that we die. Perhaps even more frightening than the fiery visions of Dante's hell is an afterlife of nothing ­– an abyss of blankness in which we sit alone forever, bored out of our skulls.

Even in life, we flee from the idea of “nothing.” We are raised with the ubiquitous expectation that we “become something,” that we “do something with our lives.” We look down upon people we deem lazy, who are “do-nothings.” Nothing is synonymous with meaningless, purposelessness, emptiness – all of which have a deeply negative connotation in our culture.

This fear and dislike of nothing is not, however, shared by all cultures. In many Eastern spirituality traditions, particularly Zen Buddhism, there is in fact a great respect for “nothing”. The technical term in Buddhism for the state of interdependence in which all beings exist is Sunyata – which literally means “emptiness” or “the void.” To our Western ears this sounds like a highly depressing concept, which is why Buddhism strikes some at first glance as being a nihilistic philosophy. But that is the furthest thing from the truth.

Let’s take Japanese art as an example for a moment, which was highly inspired by the philosophy of Zen. In a Japanese painting, the empty space, the background, is often deemed just as important as the subject or the foreground. The “nothing” is just as important as the “something”. The depiction of a flower, a mountain, or a river is not considered complete unless it is viewed within the context of the space in which it lives.

What is the subject, foreground, or something of our lives – as we normally conceive it? For most of us, it is the perceptions, thoughts, and stories created by our egos. In this story, we tend to view ourselves as the center of the universe. If we then try to seek out the center of who we are, we usually point to the general feeling of “I” that resides within us – usually located somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears. This “I” feeling has a biography, a name, a job, worries, anxieties, hopes, fears, the whole thing. It’s who we are – or, at least who we think we are.

If that is the subject or foreground of our lives, what is the background? Obviously, it is our environment, our surroundings, the society in which we live, and the natural world around us. But it actually goes much deeper than that. For many of us, our bodies feel like the background. We feel that we are in our bodies, but we often do not consider ourselves to be our bodies. Therefore we use possessive words to describe our body: “my arm,” “my leg,” “my big toe.” We say “I have a body” not “I am a body.” We consider ourselves (the “I” or the ego) to be separate from our bodies, separate from the environment around us, separate from the Universe itself.

What we generally call “doing something” in life is when we feel deeply rooted in the stories and thoughts of our ego. For instance, we set a goal for ourselves, we accomplish it, and we feel a sense of pride. But a goal, in and of itself, is just a mental concept. Can you reach down and pick up a “goal”? Can you hold it in your hand? Of course not, because “goals” don’t exist in the real world. Yet the accomplishment of “goals” is very real to the ego.

The ego loves to create standards for who we should be or how we should live and then constantly measure our progress in how successfully or not we are meeting that standard. This constant measuring and judging is one of the greatest sources of stress and anxiety in our lives.

When we aren’t busy spending our lives doing this perpetual goal-setting, measuring, judging, labeling, etc. – what then is there left to do? Well, to our egos, the answer is obvious: nothing. If we aren’t constantly striving for something, life has no significant purpose, no meaning, right? Well, the ego is pretty sure of this, but does that make it necessarily true?

What happens when we do what the ego refers to as “nothing”? – when we sit down and meditate, when we lay in a field and watch the clouds drift in the sky, when we sit by a creek in the middle of a hike and just watch the water roll on by? According to the Puritan work ethic so longed praised here in America, this activity is worthless: it isn’t productive, it isn’t valuable, or, in other words, it isn’t helping you make money. But is the sole purpose of life to make money, to make “productive use out of one’s time”? This is the same attitude that found it acceptable to steal land from the indigenous people of the country because they weren’t “doing anything productive with it” – meaning that they were instead living in harmony with it, which is something still a mystery to the Western mindset.

When we are doing “nothing,” we are actually connecting to something larger, something greater than our narrow-minded ego and its obsession with goals, judgments, and productivity. We connect with the organism of our bodies and with the larger organism of this living, breathing Planet Earth.

When we do this, we are in fact doing a quite a profound “something.” We start to feel a deep peace and joy filling our bodies and our spirits. It can be a strange feeling at first, and yet it feels so familiar. We tend to actually remember this feeling from childhood, in our carefree days of exploring our backyards and neighborhoods without with worries and neurotic fixations of adulthood.

How sweet it can feel to stop the ceaseless energy of this crazed modern technological world. To stop and breathe. To stop and simply take a look around at the flowers, the trees, the contents of a room. To do this feels like a new birth, an immaculate re-conception of what it feels like to be alive.

I think it’s important that everyone stop and do nothing for a least a few minutes each day. Turn off the cell phone, turn off the computer and the television. Put away the books and magazines. Forget about your To Do List for just a little while.

Sit down somewhere and enjoy doing nothing. Take a seat on a park bench and just watch the trees wave to you in the breeze. Feel your breath coming in and out of your body. Allow yourself to get in touch with how pleasant it feels to simply be alive.

Allow the wisdom of your body and the earth, the wisdom so drowned out by all the inner noise, to begin to speak. What you will hear and what you do with that wisdom depends entirely on you. I could attempt to explain my own experience with this wisdom, but that takes all the mystery and wonder out of it.

It’s best that you simply tune in and listen for yourself.

~ Matthew Foley