Good Morning Everyone,
It is cold enough outside that our heater clicked on this morning sending warmth throughout the condo. I have mixed feelings about this as heat costs and money is in short supply. Our refuge in the mountains was a bit simpler though more difficult. We chopped wood for the stove, built a fire and in an hour or two the house began to warm. The differences, aside from the obvious, were in the deliberate nature of life. Living wasn't automatic.
If we wanted clean dishes, we washed them by hand with water collected from our roof and pumped up to a tank on the hill behind the refuge so gravity would send it back into the house. If we wanted to cook, we made a fire and waited for the cookstove to get hot enough to cook. When we needed something from the store, it was a day trip. Nothing happened on its own. We were intimately involved with living.
Here in the city, we live much more in our heads as our bodies do very little and are, comparatively, far less involved. For myself, I miss the deliberate and intimate life the refuge afforded me. It was harder, to be sure, and I don't really believe I should go back to it full time, but I still yearn for that connection with life itself.
To make such a connection we must make it. Jews have a way of phrasing things that says this. We "make Shabbos" we "make a blessing" and so on. Or, as my grandfather used to say, he was going to "make water" when he went to the bathroom.
What these mean is that we create our connection through our activity by being conscious of the activity as we do it. We are partners with the Absolute in our own creation. Life is never singular.
If you want a spiritual life you must make your life spiritual and to do this you must become intimate and deliberate in its making.
Be well.
Rev. Dr. So Daiho Hilbert-roshi
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