Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. — Zen Proverb
For the first few minutes in meditation . . . you feel in your body that you’re somehow framing the world in another way. — Stephen Batchelor
I rip the label off, shake out the remaining sticky drops, and firmly hold the empty cola bottle lengthways against the weathered purple table that’s been a fixture at our allotment for at least a decade. I insert the blade of my Stanley knife into the clear plastic with precise determination, an inch from the bottom, where the material starts thinning. Slowly turning the bottle with my left hand, holding my cutting hand steady, I try to maintain a right angle all the way round so that the cut arrives neatly back at the starting point and the bottom falls away easily. If the plastic is moulded with horizontal ridges, this is relatively easy, but even so the blade has a will of its own, tending to zigzag, and I need to stay focused. The next cut is three inches along, and depending on the size of the bottles—all retrieved from the communal recycling bins—I get two or three collars per item. Then I measure the circumference of each piece with copper tape, which I cut to the required length and run scissors along the length of it to create two narrower bands. If the copper does indeed repel slugs and snails—and research on that is divided, it has to be said—the width of the strip probably won’t matter that much and I like to be economical. Now comes the fiddliest, most time-consuming part: separating the backing tape from the adhesive copper strip, before I can stick it around the bottle segment as a beautifully sparkling slug barrier.
As I poke and scrape my fingernail to insert it into that elusive gap between the two layers, the edge softening and bending away, resisting separation, the pleasant, smooth rhythm of the production line is disrupted. After a few completed collars, a degree of frustration and impatience makes itself felt. “A dozen more to go,” I think in a forward-pushing sort of way, my shoulders and neck stiff from staying in the same position and from being in the grip of end-goaling. This is exactly the point where a door to a more expanded, choiceful, and relaxed state of awareness can open. “Even when you are working at the assembly line in a factory,” Vessantara, the meditation teacher on my previous retreat said, “you can enter the Greater Mandala of Aesthetic Appreciation.” I had been wondering how many of us in the meditation hall had any experience of that type of work. As it happens, I do, to a very small extent.
When I was around 16 years old, I had a summer job in an egg-processing facility, where eggs were scanned for cleanliness, size, and freshness and packed into cartons. I still have a body memory of grabbing three eggs with each hand from the conveyor band, sliding them into the carton, closing it, and stacking it behind me, taking about three seconds per box. I also had to watch the monitor of the scanner, where eggs that had been fertilized showed up in a darker tone of orange. Those were picked out and thrown into a bucket. You were discouraged from asking any questions, but I somehow learned that those rejects went to biscuit factories. It was clear to me even then, or so I remember, that the repetitive nature of the work was both a drag and an opportunity. In order to not numb out with boredom, I could stay curious and take a certain delight in what I was observing through my senses, or even in the fact that I had the choice to do so. I was particularly interested in gaining a closer sense of the tough-skinned women with whom I worked, so very different from my sensitive, reclusive mother. Not that they were very interested in me, a tall, skinny, cello-playing high school girl with whom they had little in common. The most direct communication I received was from the driver who picked me up from the road every morning for five weeks, requesting in no uncertain terms that I should pay my share of the petrol costs. I learned a few useful lessons during that period.
So here are a few ways to turn a seemingly boring, repetitive activity—be it cutting vegetables or plastic bottles—into a mindful opportunity:
- • Connect with the senses. In the midst of a straightforward task, there can be a tendency for thoughts to wander, which may or may not serve a positive state of mind. Explore what happens when you start paying close attention through hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, and the felt sense. I feel the crumpled texture of the copper tape as it welds itself to the curved shape of the bottle. I marvel at the light reflected from its sienna hue. A blackbird sings and there is the rumble of the river, emerging from the oblivion caused by autopilot.
- • Balance focused and peripheral awareness. You can reset your brain by switching hemispheres, looking with a more relaxed gaze, and taking in the bigger picture. It is a way of being present that’s less wordy, less self-focused, less specific, more attuned to beauty, relational and holistic. I feel my body relaxing and become a bit less “my” body, more integrated into the whole field of experience—aware of all other plots and plot-holders at the allotment, with different growing methods and different ways to enjoy gardening. All while being precise and careful with the knife and finding the starting point for peeling off the backing tape.
- • Connect with purpose. Ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?” Fashioning these slug barriers is an eco-friendly way to successfully grow plants for eating and for aesthetic enjoyment, while minimizing harm to wildlife and re-using some plastic. And further than that, I am embracing the repetitive nature of it as an opportunity to practice patience and cultivate more expansive, less ego-fixated ways of being present. It is an invitation to be fully present NOW, as I place a copper-ringed collar over a tender red chard seedling and rotate it securely into the soil.
- • Relax into the simplicity. Repeating a straightforward task offers the opportunity for mind and body to be easeful—we know how to do this. There is also the satisfaction of completing a task—a meal cooked with care or a bagful of plastic collars ready for employment.
- • Enjoy the ritual aspect of it. Awareness transforms a repetitive, routine activity into a ritual that celebrates being alive and connects us with a larger frame of meaning. Small, ordinary, repeated actions, experienced consciously, bind us into the matrix of perpetual daily and seasonal rhythms, and with human history. In my allotment garden, I am aware of belonging to a lineage of ancestors who would have had a keen sense of interbeing with nature as living presence, as they gathered food and cultivated the land. It requires only a little shift in awareness to conceive of these copper-adorned rings as modern magic spells. They are alluring while communicating a clear message of “keep out.”
Our lives play themselves out in rhythm and counter-rhythm, repetition with endless shades of variation. Our state of mind is profoundly shaped by what we do repeatedly, what we give energy to. In our fast, highly mechanized and digitalized, short-term gain-oriented world, there are movements toward valuing simple manual pursuits such as knitting, home-cooking, and generally making things with our hands. They can soothe our stressed nervous systems, improve concentration and build resilience. Spiritual practitioners down the ages have always known how to tether their aspirations to the reiterating, calming rhythms of manual work, mantra chanting and simply breathing—and knowing you are breathing, and knowing there is no one there, breathing.
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