“What things would I do with my time if I was arranging my daily life so every act was a devotional, religious act, full of meaning and purpose, something really truly worth doing with my limited time in this life?” Initially, I knocked out a list of Important Things to Do, my “monk list,” over the course of a weekend, and it has changed since. It went like this:
TURN THE YEAR meaning do the holidays up as they go by, mark time with ritual acts
HOLD BABIES by which I mostly meant to listen to that voice that first whispered when i was alone with my first newborn that he wanted to be rocked, but also, a metaphor for giving to the selfishly needy
DANCE in a participatory way because people need touch
SING because what a crime not to play an instrument one is born with
READ to consume culture for the containers of our souls are made of culture and need freshening
WRITE because you were here once and won't be forever and not a single soul’s effort to understand should be wasted
FUCK because all acts of love and pleasure are Her rituals
SIT UNDER TREES where you can be entirely covered in a slow, old aura; roots under, branches above
LOOK AT STARS to remind you of how small you are and how long time is
LABOR FOR THE LOVE OF ONE ANOTHER because there is work to be done, not to have your back scratched
CONSULT ORACLES because there is wisdom out there without a voice of its very own
COMMIT BEAUTIFUL PRAYERS TO MEMORY because there will be profound moments and you will be speechless
After thinking and experimenting over the course of a few years, I had added these:
FORGIVE INFINITELY because life is for love and you only get stronger at it by doing it when it seems impossible
BE LOYAL TO TRUTH like a dog to its beloved master, following it, listening to its orders; else is senseless for truth will pwn
PAUSE and be here now, where you are, as you are, without considerations
BOW to everyone and everything as a master and teacher
GUARD YOUR TONGUE like a pacifist with a loaded gun, not even used for unkindness against unkindness; thus make the world safe for truth
GOOF AROUND because what makes you human is open-ended experimentation (a.k.a. play)
OCCUPY YOUR FOOD CHAIN meaning grow food, eat local, avoid processing, compost your leftovers, your poo and someday your body, because you are not above or outside nature and nature is about eating and being eaten
I thought at great length about that last one because I worried I was forcing it.
Making dinner is something I have done with my kids for years,
to teach them to cook,
to teach health practices and nutritional principles and simple lessons in safety and life skills
and, yes, fractions.
It was also necessary if I wasn’t homeschooling anyone, necessary if I wasn’t being a monk.
It held a mixed position in what I began to think of as my monk list.
Not just optional, like dancing and singing, not just an add-on,
but an essential thing done up in an intentional, holy way.
Placing OCCUPY YOUR FOOD CHAIN on my List of Important Things meant not just incorporating the holy between the mundane necessary pillars
but sanctifying the mundane unavoidables of my days.
But I HATE the verb "sanctify".
I am not making anything holy.
I do not hold with the New Agers who think they have such powers.
I think,
the things the world is made of,
they come with an inherent self-ness
and I encounter it
not create it.
I mean I know, I know
I know what the physicists say about changing things by encountering them and it isn’t that I don’t believe physicists
just that when it comes to being-to-being interactions
manners is better than physics
and manners dictates that we let everyone define themselves first and ultimately.
Truly, on a daily level, I am not wise enough to tell dragonfly about itself.
I want dragonfly to tell me
because manners is right - dragonfly knows himself better.
No, I am not sanctifying dinner.
Rather, I am finally getting around to acknowledging the holiness inherent in something I've been mistakenly breezing past as mundane.
How far could that go, I wondered, this intentional doing of necessary things?
What about brushing my teeth? Is there a way to do that which brings out its inherent holiness?
I pondered this but thought it was too much of a stretch.
I didn’t want to force anything.
When I say I pondered this, I mean
I applied no rigorous test to these mottoes.
I did not look for them in holy books or anything like that.
I just felt to see if I could do them and feel like I was doing an unquestionably right thing.
It was all woo-woo,
unverifiable personal gnosis.
When my husband started coming up with his own,
and some of them were very different from mine
or even felt opposite to mine
-- things one must never do --
I discovered a little more about my criteria
but nothing I could put into very clear words
yet.
We went rounds on playing board games.
While I am willing to tolerate an occasional game for the sake of socializing
they strike me as a perfect waste of time
a pointless diversion of perfectly good minds from life which is calling to be lived.
He managed to convince me by posing it as play
a way of experimenting with what life would be like if we weren’t operating bodies on Earth
but, say, pixels on screens.
I dislike games because life is a game and other games are competitors that sometimes suck people away from the real game.
He convinced me to look at games as open-ended experimentation
trying on models, other formats, for the ultimate game which is life
and if maybe somewhere out there gods are designing more forms of life
then I hope they are paying attention to why Munchkin is more fun than Dungeons & Dragons.
Anyway, open-ended, experimental play went on my monk list after that conversation.
I called it GOOF AROUND.
Goofing around feels holy.
Three happy years went by with me adding to and contemplating and erasing from and working on
this Monk Life list
and I did some art on the theme
causing small children who visited to point and ask
especially about the F-word one.
Then I was pregnant, and, in my first trimester, very very sick. For three months I did this:
woke up at noon,
pulled on my husband’s giant black thermal pants under my favorite black knit T-shirt dress,
sat around watching the children do cool stuff ,
gathered the strength to eat,
puked it all up,
went down for a nap,
got up, ate again,
managed not to puke by staying very still,
and fell asleep at 7pm for the whole night.
I forgot what it was like to do dishes and laundry every day,
to eat dinner with my family on a regular basis
or make the boys learn something because parent-wisdom said it’d go easier for them that way.
For a little while towards the end there,
I forgot that I had ever been a strong enough person to do those three things
every single day.
It was bad.
When the baby died at the beginning of my second trimester, I found something out. That, though, is for the next post.