Chopping Wood, Carrying Water

For any readers familiar with Zen Buddhism the above phrase will be familiar: “Before enlightenment, chopping wood, carrying water; after enlightenment, chopping wood, carrying water.” When I was young and much more idealistic than I am now–and I am still an idealist!–I used to picture enlightenment as a constant state of bliss…perhaps even as an escape from the mundane. I was wrong, of course. Enlightenment isn’t about ending life as we know it, but about changing our inner attitude towards life as we know it: Everything has changed, but nothing is different. Chopping wood and carrying water. Life does go on and we need to eat, sleep, do some form of work etc.

My wife and I live on a little farm in Basse Normandie which we share with goats, chickens and a cat. Because we heat with wood, my daily routine is shaped by chopping wood (that’s one of our woodpiles in the photo) and carrying water. Just recently we had 12 days of below freezing weather which resulted in the well water freezing. Thus we had to carry a lot of water from our house to our goats and hens. It was simply necessary to sustain life. Yet it wasn’t drudgery because this is a life I choose and I wouldn’t change it with anyone.

A little background: From my earliest days I was counter-cultural. A dear professor friend once said to me, “Frère Jacques (his nickname for me) your greatest challenge in life will be to walk the fine line between being co-opted by society and its norms and being crushed beneath its wheel.” I was 19 years old…whew! Yet truer words were never spoken. Being academically gifted I spent numerous years as a “student prince” accruing scholarships and grants and studying at world class universities, such as Duke and Harvard. I earned four degrees, my doctoral dissertation was published by a renowned academic press and yet…I found academia as full of snobs and pricks as the rest of the society. At the same period I became an ordained minister–mistakenly thinking that the church offered a viable countercultural life. Well, it did for the 7 years I was a prison chaplain (where I felt curiously at home!) but parish life became a boring round of hatch, match and despatch religion, with very little curiosity about the bigger questions of life or service to others.

Now let us go back to about 1972. I was spending a winter term with some fellow students on my family’s farm in the lower Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It was an experiment in communal living which turned out to be a disastrous learning experience. During this time I wandered into a small roadside cabin which sold second-hand tools, etc. I had needed a good bow saw. The owner sat by his little pot-bellied stove for warmth. Now here was a man who seemed genuinely at peace with himself and the world. It turns out that he split his time between his little shop and being the janitor at the local bank. He talked reflectively about the people he saw entering and leaving the bank. It was a mixture of hope, tears, worry and disappointment–all focussed around money: the need for it or lack of it. This man lived a quiet, almost monastic life, with few material needs beyond life’s necessities. He made an impression on me that has lasted to this day. (And I still have the bow saw!) But at that time I had my lust for knowledge and travel which drove me towards some sort of “future fulfilment.” One day, my friends and I went hiking around a lake formed by a Tennessee Valley Authority dam, where I encountered another chap whose impression would last a lifetime. He actually lived inside the dam! There was a small apartment on the top edge of the dam. He operated the gates to send water down the Dan River. (This was in the days when things had to be done manually.) Once again, he lived a sort of monastic existence. He had shelter, warmth and the necessary comforts: electricity, water, etc. His life was spent in exquisite natural beauty and tranquility. And like the shopkeeper, he had peace of mind.

Maybe I am just a slow learner or needed the stern tutelage of life’s hard knocks. I have flirted with being co-opted by society’s charms and have come damn close to being crushed beneath society’s wheel. But neither of those possible outcomes has had the final say. Learning to be who I am, where I am has been a lesson well worth the learning. If I could never go on an aircraft or ship again, and were restricted to our little farm, I wouldn’t shed a tear. I will gladly go on chopping wood and carrying water on this little piece of paradise.