Moving Earth

On Monday, in two days, we start excavating. We were all set to start a week ago, but got a call the day before that Bob the Excavator’s mother had just died, and he needed to back out of the job. By now we’ve heard the dying mother, dying cousin, and dying vague relation excuse several times from subcontractors who haven’t called back, haven’t submitted their bid, or haven’t shown up for a meeting. But this time it was real- Bob was the kind of soft-spoken guy who would pause in conversation to bend down and caress a little clover plant, and who was fascinated by the delicate sand dollars that were laying on the back porch. Not the sort of guy who would lie about his mother. So we offered our condolences and spend last week getting three more excavation bids. We’ve lined someone up, but it’s too bad about Bob, because his gentle nature made the thought of ripping into this beautiful little piece of land much easier to bear.

For the past few months, swarms of men in hard hats and filthy sweatshirts have been digging eight foot deep sewer trenches all over town. Huge yellow mammoth-machines have been crawling and scraping through the streets, grinding couch sized boulders in their steel teeth and spitting mounds of dirt and rock in their wake. So we’re well prepared for the loud crunches of steel on rock, for the constant roar of diesel engines, and the smell of fossil fuels in the air. It is easy, and painful, to think of this as violence against the earth, to think of the beautiful lichen-covered boulders as sentient beings uprooted from their rightful homes. Which is why we liked Bob so much, because we could create a different story, of a soft, fuzzy-grey haired man gently lifting the rock-people, bringing sunlight to those underground earthlings who hadn’t seen it for millions of years, and happily transporting them to a new flatland field where they would have fresh air forever and million dollar views of the front range.

It’s all in the story. Neither one is really the truth, so does it matter which one we choose? Sometimes, I think, it does. If I tell myself that the man holding a sign on the street corner is just trying to buy beer, or that he’s there because of personal failures or bad deeds, it allows me to turn away. If I tell a story of a decent human being in poor circumstances, I have to look a little closer. Who knows what the real truth is? But in this case, the story that leads to the most compassionate response is the one worth telling. And maybe it doesn’t even need a story; maybe the bottom line truth is just that this person is obviously suffering, no matter how he got there.

But I digress. On Monday, when I watch the backhoe bite into our land, I’m going to think of happy rocks being released into sunlight. I’m going to be grateful for machines that can accomplish a lifetime of shoveling into a week, and for the smiling, open-hearted men driving them. I’m going to think of toes wiggling down into the sand, of a little space on this earth opening up for us to live in, and of a grey-bearded, benevolent God gently patting the earth, saying “Here. Come sit right here.”

Back to the Land

It was the ultimate Leave No Trace house, disappearing from the land without even a footprint. The last stage went fast- it only took two days to pull off the rim joists, to twist the beams away from their anchors, and then to simply lift the heavy square posts off of the rocks where they had been sitting for the past hundred years. The fat four inch nails let go with long, drawn out creaks and groans, but released their grip with surprising ease. It was so gentle and simple that it felt as if the house was rising into the air- evaporating like a fine mist into the light blue sky of the valley.

And now it is a piece of rocky land, shadowed by a giant douglas fir, with the stump of a brick chimney squatting on the sidelines. Even though that little piece of earth hadn’t seen the sun for all those years, it received it as naturally as if it had just been one long night of darkness. Already the fir has dropped a layer of needles and cones on the bare earth, and the rocks that had been trapped in the two-foot crawlspace are now being walked on by upright humans and sniffing dogs.

A house is something that you expect to be solid, to exist forever, or at least to outlast your own relatively short-term life. Throughout the whole process, every time something changed we would experience an unsettling disorientation. When a wall dropped, rafters became exposed, or a hole appeared in the roof, we would do head-spinning double-takes as we reassessed the proportions of our changing little world. And when it disappeared completely, we couldn’t quite believe it was gone. It’s a lot like when someone dies- it takes time to remember that he won’t be walking in the door at three o’clock. Where did he go? What happened to our house????

I recently returned from a Zen retreat, which involves whole days of sitting in silence, observing the rising and falling of sense perceptions, the thoughts that follow, and the stories and identities we make from those thoughts. It becomes clear that none of these thoughts about who I am, is really who I am. One by one we toss out the identifications, realizing that each has no real substance, no ultimate reality. And in rare moments, we touch something that IS solid- the space in which it all arises.

In the same way, there was no one element that defined the house, and nothing that securely held it together. The pieces fell apart like they had been just waiting to drop. In some places, rotten posts were balanced on rotten floorboards, held there only by the attachments of everything around them. Without its roof, it was still the house. Without the floor, it was still the house. Even with just a few beams left, it was still the house. Like the movie we saw last night about a guy in a coma- even with nothing left, as long as he was breathing, he was there. Until he was gone.

What I’m trying to get at in this terribly profound little story is that the very things we think are solid and permanent, like ourselves, and houses, aren’t. We give names to collections of thoughts and habits, and call them people. We give the name ‘house’ to a collection of lumber and nails that surrounds a section of air. And now the same little piece of air that used to be defined by its surrounding walls and roof and floor, our ‘house’, is still the same space, the same air, but undefined by boundaries. Perhaps it’s the same with us.

Soon we will begin the process of enclosing that space again, building a structure that we will once again call house. But having seen the open space in which it will arise, something is different. The illusion of permanence has been cracked. And although we will still call it house, and rely on its solid nature, we will also know that someday, this too will leave without a trace.