Movement

In the months before I began writing my dissertation, I found that I had an immeasurable amount of energy.  I had a small baby and an old man and my committee at NYU waiting for chapters.  I hadn't written any.  I thought I had writer's block.

When I write poetry, I feel the urge building in me for several days.  A subject is compelling me to write, but the words take time to surface.  When I have the initial image, or the first lines, then I can write.  And then I write for days or weeks until the feeling passes.  Or until I feel that I've exhausted the subject.  

It wasn't different for the dissertation.  I couldn't begin a chapter without the first lines, without the anecdote that would introduce that chapter's topic.  Once I found that, I wrote almost three hundred pages in about five months.

But before that, when I couldn't write, I felt that I could do anything else.  I washed the cars every other day.  I cleaned the house every night.  I swept the driveway with a wide broom every day.  I polished wood; I scrubbed floors embedded with the ubiquitous dirt of an aging construction worker.  I planted lantana and basil and nameless flowers in the backyard.  Every night, I lay awake, thinking about the work that I wasn't doing on my dissertation, and then I got up and cleaned something.

I'm feeling the same energy now, but I'm not writing a dissertation (thankfully).  It isn't manic.  It isn't o.c.d.  It is energy that wants to move.  I want to move.

I'm waking in the morning thinking, 'what work can I do today?'  I'm calling the monks in my community, asking them, 'can I come to the temple and work?'  I even called my mother and asked her if I can help her husband take care of the yard.  'You?  Do yard work?'  She sounded appalled.  I don't think I've ever pushed a lawnmower in my life.  I want to now.

Alongside sitting meditation, work is at the core of Zen practice.  We rake a field, we wash pots, we dig in a garden with one mind and one body.  With the mind on the action and the breath appropriate for the action.  Raking a field has the same value as bowing, sitting, chanting.  We can see our minds and see 'who am I' with every push and pull of the rake.   

I want to work.