Sep 2, 2002, 12.02am IST
MARGUERITE THEOPHIL.
I had been falling behind my body-work and meditation practice schedule. I had a pretty valid excuse: water shortage. With piped water available for only two hours each morning, washing clothes was a priority, leaving little time to attend to other work.
My husband, a regular with his practice, was pleased when Swami Dharmakeerti visited our city — she would tell me how important this was to my life, and I would act on her words. When we met and she asked how our practice was going, he quickly told her about my ‘washing obsession’.
Swamiji smiled and said: “Well, if she is washing clothes when she is washing clothes, that is good.”
Noting our puzzlement, she added, to me: “If you are doing your practice, while all the time your mind is held by the idea of ‘oh dear, I should be washing clothes instead’ — the practice is almost useless. And when you are washing clothes, you do it with attention and mindfulness, not thinking that you should be actually doing your meditation or practice — then, washing clothes itself can be your meditation.”
Thich Nhat Hanh taught the power of mindfulness and the importance of being present and fully engaged in each moment and in each act.
He told a friend that there are two ways to wash the dishes: The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes.
In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes that this consciousness or mindfulness rejuvenates everything, giving a “quality of beginning” to the most everyday action.
He quotes Henri Bosco who wrote of the transformation of an object through attention: Of how, polishing an old wooden tray, the soft wax enters into the polished article under the pressure of hands and the effective warmth of a woollen cloth, and how the tray slowly begins to take on a dull lustre.
In fact, “It was as though the radiance induced by magnetic rubbing emanated from the 100-year-old sapwood, from the very heart of the dead tree, and spread gradually, in the form of light, over the tray”.
Danah Zohar, the physicist, writes of a kind of ‘sculpting effect’ that is produced in many of our objects through prolonged use. A new hammer has little ‘character’, but if it has a wooden handle, it will eventually take the shape of its renewed contact with the worker’s hand and his work. She also writes of two inner London parks.
One was the responsibility of the local city council, the other of the residents of nine local streets. The city park, maintained over the years by professional workers who put nothing of themselves into it, “expressed no creative dialogue with its surroundings, and evoked none from those who frequented it”. Naturally, it was strewn with litter and frequently vandalised.
The other park, designed and built and planted by local residents and their children, “was a world” of caring and invitation to dialogue with its spaces — “a lived and living thing”.
My mother-in-law’s legacy to us is her simple, direct advice: ‘‘I do ‘something caring’ for a different part of my house every single day.” So, learning from her, each of us daily picks a corner, a shelf, an object — whether it is an art piece or a kitchen pot or pan — to minister to and so to lovingly ‘dialogue’ with each day.
D H Lawrence’s words sum it all up: “Give and it shall be given unto you is still the truth about life. But giving life is not so easy. It doesn’t mean handing it out to some mean fool or letting the living dead eat you up. It means kindling the life-force where it was not, even if it’s only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-handkerchief.”
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