Dirty Kitchens and Profound Peace

Field Notes

Night tree

*Note: The day after I finished writing the following, I fell on the ice and broke my left wrist. This is the third time I’ve broken this wrist falling on ice and the second time I will need surgery on it. I am very much hoping that I have met my quota on broken bones, at least in this particular place. However, the experience adds a certain acuity to both of the subjects I present here. Dirty kitchens and broken body parts can be made new; profound peace can exist even in the midst of physical pain.

**Another Note: I’ll be taking next week off from the newsletter to have surgery but will be back on 1/26 with another newsletter and perhaps, more than one hand with which to type.

And now:

Welcome to Field Notes. Here, you’ll find short reflections and questions to support your intentional life. Please comment to share your experiences of living with attention.

My last Airbnb guests left the house a mess. This has happened very infrequently in my hosting experience. To be clear, the house wasn’t “trashed.” They even did some laundry and stripped the beds. But the family had stayed nearly two weeks, and the kitchen counters and stove looked like they’d never felt the friendly touch of a wash rag, while the floors got mistaken for a trash can. To make matters worse, I had less than 24 hours to clean the B and B before my next guests arrived, a wonderful family with four grown children who had all gathered at the house last year at this time. As I grumbled my way through the kitchen, scrubbing cabinets, floors, and scraping gunk off the stove, I was angry. “I would never treat someone else’s house this way,” I told myself. I tried to remember that everyone lives differently and that each person carries so much. Perhaps, trash on the floor does not command attention in some households because other much more insistent matters do. But then I looked around the space; the dining room, living room, and yes, the kitchen, could all be made clean again. They could be made new, by me. I could make a place for my next guests to enjoy, just as I had for the previous ones. Those previous guests brought their lives into the house, all their human heartaches and joys, and the house held them. Now, I could make room for the next group of lives, and the house would hold them too. The rest of the cleaning went by with much less complaining on my part as I did the work of host and transformed the house, preparing it to welcome and contain the next group of lives.

Where do you notice the messes in your life? Where can you be a “host” to yourself, clearing rubble and making space for the new? Where do you see the new appearing in your life?

Recently, I woke up in the early morning because I heard a noise, the “ding” our otherwise non-functioning house alarm system makes when somebody opens a door. When I wake up like this, which happens semi-frequently, I’m never sure whether the origin of the sound I’m hearing is inside or outside of my head. Despite the nebulous source of the sound, my foggy and catastrophe prone brain usually convinces me that someone is trying to get into the house. Then I have to decide whether I am worried enough to get out of a warm bed and go check the doors. On this night, I worried enough. After checking the perimeter, so to speak, and finding it secure, I went back to bed and hovered at the edge of sleep. Then something much less jarring than a phantom burglar, and infinitely more significant occurred. As I lay buried beneath blankets, blinking at the white ceiling, I felt a suffused sense of peace. I found myself thinking, “I am o.k. . . . we are o.k. . . .everything is o.k.” In those few moments of early dawn, I felt no conflict, no emotion, no muddled brain, only stillness. My whole being became incredibly and quietly still. I knew. I rested. Eventually, I fell asleep again. But the felt memory of the experience lingers. Conflict, holding and living with seeming opposites, has defined much of my internal life, while equanimity and freedom from persistent, difficult or strong emotions remain illusive. Much sought and longed for balance has come through acceptance, not absence, of struggle. So those few minutes of quiet accord had the ironic effect of a huge boulder thrown into the lake of my life. As I continue to recall them, I find myself doing so less with words than with simple remembered presence. I am incredibly grateful for the appearance of this now motionless boulder in my stormy life and am curious about the ongoing effects of its sudden occurrence.

What “boulders” have shown up in your life? How have you accommodated them? What effects have they had? What is your relationship with peace?