CURRENTS THROUGH USELESS BAY

As I sat in my contemplative place yesterday in the heart of the woods, I opened my notebook and a bright orange meadowhawk dragonfly plopped immediately onto a note I’d written that said: “passion-do it for love, not for money.” These were notes I’d made after watching a brief video by Richard St. John about the “secrets of success”. I liked the video because it was short and to the point, and I thought I could fill in the blanks myself.

Passion. It’s difficult, sometimes, to know how to turn one’s passion into work that can sustain a living. And yet, if we don’t find a way, we become like the walking dead, coldly moving through boring routines that aren’t fulfilling or stimulating. Passion is the thing that keeps us interested through the difficult parts of our work. It’s what helps us keep going when obstacles emerge, and gives us the persistence to get through. Without a real love for what we do, it will be difficult to commit to the inevitable rote work that exists in any field. When I’m doing something I don’t want to do, it takes me much longer, I wrestle with resistance, and I find it drains me much more physically.

And yet, there a thousand menial tasks that have to be done by someone, and we can’t always do just what we want to do. Every day the dishes need to be washed, the food cooked, the bed made and the floor swept. If we are lucky enough to have them, we have to take care of our children and cars or bicycles or gardens. If we can’t find a way to enter these tasks without struggle and resistance, our lives will be very dreary indeed. If we are depending on excitement to get us through, we are setting ourselves up for failure. And so we need a passion that is bigger than our love for business, or farming, or marketing, or airplanes, or espresso. That’s what I like about Zen practice. Since it is based on bringing awareness and mindfulness into every aspect of our lives, I find I can connect with my passion for this contemplative practice no matter what I do.

Back to Goldsworthy: watching this man make his sculptures, one can see that each one is an incredibly tedious process. So why does he do it? Listening to him speak as his sculpture is claimed by a flooding tide, he talks about how he still feels very connected to the stones he piled one on top of the other–though he cannot at the moment even see his sculpture which is below water level, he feels it in his body.

And I think it can be this way with Zen practice. I feel with each dish that I wash that connection I have with it. When I am out in nature, walking or sitting, I sense its presence. When my passion flags, there is something much bigger and I am still in its embrace. And what a waste, my life would be, if this were not so. How I would spend my hours in regret and tedium! So, Zen is a good passion for me. It works on every level. It helps me connect with nature, and nature helps me connect with my zen practice. It helps my writing, and in my everyday chores. Everything that I do becomes its vehicle, and every encounter I have, is its opportunity to deepen in me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Useless Bay Journals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.