Chop wood, carry water

“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” — Zen Kōan.

On a flight from Puerto Rico to Houston a couple years ago, I sat next to a man on the plane who was returning from his first trip outside the mainland U.S. I was closing out a weeks-long visiting my family there, time I didn’t know how badly I needed until I arrived and didn’t feel like I could, or really wanted, to leave. Piping hot Puerto Rican coffee in the moka pot every morning, hours-long walks around my family’s technicolor neighborhood, sitting at the ocean’s edge in total peace while also giggling as competing suitcase-sized speakers blasted reggaeton. Questions—and reminders—from my aunt about what I was hurrying around for anyway.

The man next to me was thrilled about his trip, while also being very respectful of my time and space on that packed plane, too. He couldn’t wait to go back, even though he’d had to visit the emergency room for slicing his foot open on a bottle while out skateboarding, I think it was. He’d splurged on his business ticket and I’d been upgraded; his energy and excitement when he heard I had family in PR, that I’d been somewhat often, reminded me again of my deep luck.

After we talked for a bit, I turned back and took out my journal. It was the same version of one I’d been using for years: a monogrammed Shinola journal. “Wow, I have the same one!” he said, and took out his. It was even the same color. I’d bought these for years and gifted them often, and I’ve never seen another one out in the wild. I still haven’t.

He asked what I liked to write about. I told him, a bit of everything, and that I used to write as my “Job,” (capital “J”), burned out from it afterward, and then once I started to mediate found my way back to it, words pouring out, and my writing different. More fluid, more surrendered, more exploratory.

“I meditate, too!” he said, and he asked me about my practice. Sometimes you can feel it—I do. When other people inhabit that liminal space often, when they find a way, despite everything else in our lives today, to total presence, when they’re the type of person or have the type of habits that can allow for just being there with a moment’s totality. It brings it out more in me, too, and reminds me of how things can really beC and the purity of things. For some friends it’s through prayer and faith, others movement; others I’ve met it’s just however they are or whatever they’ve figured out thus far in their lives, and it really works.

My seat mate didn’t practice Vedic meditation (akin to transcendental, a 20-min, twice daily, practice) as I did, but he was as familiar with it. We talked a little about our experiences, what it’s like to sit with all of it and explore both the cosmic and mundane, whatever is being served in those moments of silence.

At that point I’d been practicing for three years. “It’s both subtle and profound, I’ve found,” I told him. “It’s like everything has changed and nothing has changed at the same time.” “Exactly!” he replied. It’s like that Zen joke: “Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” I laughed. I hadn’t heard this before, and it fit. Wouldn’t you know it.

Joke, riddle, axiom, whatever it feels like it is, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. A lot has started to shift in the world, and especially the U.S., since November 2023, and in ways that hurt my heart and stir my soul. I don’t know what to do often, but I do know that I’ve learned over the years (meditating) that for myself specifically, acting from a place provoked reaction does not improve outcomes for me or have the impact I intend. I need to sit with it a bit. I need to feel it all, and see what comes through on the other side. And, sometimes, that makes me feel like I’m doing nothing, especially when so much seems like it’s unraveling so fast.

I came back to this Zen koan, and draft in blog, when last night my inspiring friend Lilian (and an incredible writer herself https://liliancaylee.substack.com/) texted me and said, “It is people like you and your words who keep me together.”

I thought, and felt like, I’d been doing nothing. And here was a friend sharing how she was gathering strength from my typing on a train, thousands of miles away. Because I came back to something I’ve always felt compelled to do: writing. And because I was reaffirming my belief in something that felt like the only possible thing I can really do, and the only path forward: Be myself. Root into what feels right. “Before [this moment]; chop wood, carry water. After [this moment]; chop wood, carry water.”

I’m doing all the same things, and I’m also doing them differently. I am the same person, and I’m also a different one. We’re all the same, and we’re all different.

We are the revolution, right?

For Lil, and The Good Gossip

"Live the questions"

I’ve loved this concept of “live the questions,” thanks to the beautiful words of Rilke, since first hearing it in a Marginalian newsletter. It feels more playful, even more empowering, to hold the concept of, “live the questions” than to just “release the ‘how’,” (and trust).

“…Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer," - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet.

“Live the questions now… live your way into the answer.” And answers, plural, I would say. Because the way of life is many ways.

And, sometimes, the answers come without the questions.

Everything is a theme

I heard someone say recently that “everything is a theme.“ I first thought of that in relation this blog and creating this space to write, reflect and create in a time when I was called to create more space in my life, often in playful ways, and how this has been, and is, a place to identify and understand themes at various points in my life, to process the past, to be with the present and to look toward the future, ideally, with more conscious awareness and loving attention.

I also found myself seeking a theme, wanting to identify a pattern, mostly because I often find it fun to play around with ideas and ideas identification. I didn’t have one for a while (like, a few days), and then it came to me quietly: patience. How fitting for it to enter that way, too, quietly, over the course of a few days, as I rest back into a month in Puerto Rico, a place where everything feels lusciously slower, a place that is always so patient with me.

I'll be glad I wrote this

I was getting ready today with some thoughts softly bumping around in my brain, like a li’l video game, and I was like, I want to write that “expand, not contract” thing I’ve been saying to myself these last weeks. And I was like, maybe I won’t do that right now; maybe I just write this. And it felt like a flowy response from my heart that said right back, “you’ll be glad you wrote this.”

Even just this. Because you wrote it for you, and it felt nice. It is nice to do this. We like this! And then I was like, yeah, I’ll be glad I wrote this. And then it/I continued, a subconscious stream of self-motivation. I’ll be glad I took that trip, and I’ll be glad that I do that bigger thing I’m thinking about for next year, and maybe that other bigger thing, too, yeah. Holding that, moving toward that feels right, whatever happens with it. Because it’s all part of all of it.

I’ll be glad I wrote this.

"Flow down and down in always widening rings of being"

I think of this Rumi quote often, this one line, the closing line, from one of his most known poems, A Community of the Spirit, as translated by Coleman Barks. I found this post, this quote, in my drafts, and in the spirit of surrender and ease, 10:10pm on a Thursday evening, felt it as resonant as ever, and the moment to share.

"Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.”

This line comes—flows—to me often, and continues to encourage me release to live life in a flow state, and to let live. To release, to become, bigger, wider, more open, freer. Let go, let flow.

The full poem:

There is a community of the spirit.

Join it, and feel the delight

of walking in the noisy street

and being the noise.

Drink all your passion,

and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes

to see with the other eye.

Open your hands,

if you want to be held.

Sit down in the circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel

the shepherd’s love filling you.

At night, your beloved wanders.

Don’t accept consolations.

Close your mouth against food.

Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.

You moan, “She left me.” “He left me.”

Twenty more will come.

Be empty of worrying.

Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison

when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.

Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always

widening rings of being.

Everything is play

Everything is a canvas; everything is play. Life is an act of constant creation, and, therefore, an act of infinite creativity.

We use “working on” so much, so much in our capitalistic, output-oriented society. So much so that it’s even used to describe how we’re feeling pulled to explore, evolve, change. (Eg: I’m “working on” this with myself.)

Since I started substituting the term “play” when I would use “work,” things have gotten so much more fun. Really, really so much more fun. There is right/wrong in play; no outcome to strive for except the joy of doing it. Plus, if we’re “working on” it, then we’re already doing it. (When we’re trying, we are doing.) So, why not make it fun. Playing on a blog > working on a blog. Playing around with writing > Working on writing

(Also, thinking about even my full-time job/”work” in the traditional sense as “play” has reframed even what at first feels like the most menial of moments and tasks.)

Play in this moment; play with this idea; play through this process, through learning and exploring. Everything is play. We are creative, creating and creators.

(Recommended reading for further play in this space: Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert.)

Dedicating this post to childhood neighbor and amiga, Carissa, with whom I still live and play on an infinite timeline of weekends, evenings and afternoons on Meadow Lane in our yards, in the pool, on swing sets, around the block and in our imaginations, To continuing to play through, and in, life. <3

The difference between 4 miles and 24 miles

Is actually nothing, except creating the space for it.

I had this thought during a recent 4.5-mile Wednesday night run with Venice Run Club. I ran the Los Angeles Marathon in late March, blooming into spring, and since then, I’ve enjoyed flowing back into a more varied fitness routine, which usually includes running about one day a week. I was pushing at that point in that run, calibrating to keep myself at that intersection of personal challenge and ease + enjoyment, a space where I’d found much to come in the past and consider ideal. It felt like so many moments of so many other runs in that all it felt like there was, was that very moment. It didn’t matter the length of the run it was part of.

In it, in that very moment, and all we have ever is this very moment, whenever and wherever that is, this actually doesn’t feel any different from any other run. Four miles, to fourteen miles, to 24 and more. You just prepare differently, and create the space. Train up to it, know you can do it, take the time to do it. And when you’re in it, you’re just with it.

I’ve heard a similar recommendation in relation to thinking about wealth, or financial abundance: It’s just about creating the mental space for it. In that, the deservingness for it. $80k and $80m is a different scope/ It takes up different space, and still, it’s all money. How do we prepare for it? ( “What if” positive thought play is a recommendation, especially for women, because women are socially conditioned to do this much less than men, of thinking and playing in the space of financial abundance. So, what if, I receive a financial windfall, X amount? What would I do with that? How would I manage it? What would I want to do with it?)

I wrote some additional things about running and the marathon, and the whole process (writing, running, all of it) felt expansive and cathartic. Posts are: