Lessons from the Back Porch

1. It’ll keep. 

2. Follow the path of love (prioritize it above the instruction book, the well-planned intention, the push to look good for others, the way it used to be or the way I used to be…). 

3. The deep beauty values the heritage grain but leans into the hard scars.

These items map backwards, circle around with persistence until a point’s taken, and defy linear logic. So the first one listed (“It’ll keep”) wasn’t earliest but got punctuated later on and more clearly as raindrops spattered bringing about a work stoppage.  

The rain was much appreciated (especially given the recent dry spell) and eased the surrender of ego-drive that wanted to finish the job “on time.” My readiness to let the project take longer than it “should” was also prompted by muscles giving out much sooner than they used to. In younger days, I probably would have driven myself to meet the high standards of quicker completion. My aging body helps me see the foolishness of such standards. A subtext on this lesson is to trust the process. I’m more willing to look closely, slow down, and spend time until qualities such as beauty and truth can be revealed. 

That seques to number 2: “Follow the path of love…” I’m realizing that qualities (love, truth, beauty…) inhere in process, even in grunt-work. This back-porch project tries to prove to me that beauty can be better known even in the apparently inartistic labor of stripping the old sealer from the wood planks. The lesson-giver forces me down on my knees scrubbing away with the recommended stiff-bristle brush, inch by inch. Since I’m a bit stubborn in accepting the lesson, some spots still have not been cleaned even after two or three tries necessitating a return trip to the store for another gallon of stripper. 

In addition to developing sight for the beauty in wood texture that I hadn’t seen before, I’m coming to know better a truth that’s more complex than the understanding that comes from reading: the knowledge of the body. This extended physical labor also pushes me to increase the value I give to embodied knowing. It doesn’t have the style of rational discourse; the voice of the body takes dedicated effort to discern.

I won't discard intellect nor the vital guidance from inspired text. Important words have been teaching me about the masks or veils that have to be removed in the spiritual quest. They’ve explained how humans are at high risk for covering over our true nature, the divine inheritance. The breadth of testimony to this permeates across religions; in The Play of Masks, Frithjof Schuon explores it in Krishna, Shakespeare, Diogenes, Jesus, Omar Khayyam, Eckhart, Goethe, David, and others. 

The masking or veiling can also be very subtle. Alan Godlas elaborates on Rūzbihān al-Baqlī’s teaching that hypocrisy, doubt, and egocentric thoughts must be surrendered to gnosis and love or we risk the “debasement of being veiled.”

My head understands this principle of removing masks/veils, and my intellectual knowing connects with life experiences that have stripped away pernicious illusion. And yet, the knowing in/of my body still needs attending. It’s my body that has to submit, to provide the more powerful perseverance that is required in stripping off highly-resistant veils, like ones that presume to define my identity but in truth carry an ungodly arrogance 

This mind/body dynamic might work like the “true unity” of rider and horse. Of course, I know the mind/body/spirit dogma, but that doesn’t mean that the knowing of/in my body is realized and respected. Probably my body-knowing has been so dominated and devalued by head-knowing that we have to absorb (or remove a mask/veil) related to the truth trying to come through. In this back-porch project, it’s taking repeated cleaning of the wood, involving sweating out at least three caps, shirts, etc. Like the lovely rainfall that halted the “get-it-done” mentality, the sweatouts were accompanied by the revelation of gorgeous textures hidden under the scum of sealers.

This truth coming in seems to be saying that I need to realize each everyday-project, the very business of living, can be and even must become a gateway to the other world. The work and play of each moment is given from God. Remember Rabia’s “Slicing Potatoes”…”putting my hands on a pot, on a broom” (in Daniel Ladinsky’s Love Poems from God, p. 10; performed on the Wilcox/Pettit CD Out Beyond Ideas). My mind may get the idea of this doorway so that I’m partially prepared for a life experience, but my body also has to be readied to join up, to surrender, sometimes to suffer the way.

When I took on this back porch project, the expert presented it in three simple steps: 1. strip the surface using product A, 2. apply the cleaner with product B, (allow time to dry), and 3. roll on the new topping. Voila. Ought to be a 2-3 day deal. I’ve lost count but this must be at least day five and I’m still in step one. 

But you know what. That’s ok with me because the lessons from the back porch are much more significant than getting it done. I’ve become leery of plans and can blame my suspicion on Mr. Burns: “The best laid schemes of Mice an’ Men gang aft agley.” Through the guidance related to veils and by attending to the revelations of labor, by searching for good work instead of results, I’m open to a transformed translation of the “cruel coulter” that strips the layer. I wonder at what kind of plough the divine hand has to employ in order to remove the facade that prevents us from seeing past skin color, income level, vocabulary… How many racist leaders are needed to strip away ethnic pride? What suffering has to happen before the eye of the heart can be opened?