Enough For Today
On not taking more than the day offers
There is a temptation, when I come into the Archives, to imagine I already know what the day ought to contain.
A cloth should be finished.
A new idea should arrive.
The basket beside the chair should hold fewer scraps when I leave than it did when I entered.
Some days, none of those things happen.
For a long time I mistook that for a day that had somehow failed to keep its promise.
I am no longer certain the day ever made such a promise.
The older my practice becomes, the less interested I am in measuring what was completed.
Instead, I find myself wondering a different thing.
What did today actually offer?
Sometimes it is only a single stitch.
Sometimes the discovery that one thread is quieter than another.
Sometimes nothing more than noticing how the morning light reveals a patch of indigo differently than it did yesterday.
It is surprisingly difficult to leave it there.
There is always the temptation to borrow from tomorrow.
To make one more decision.
To begin another cloth.
To ask the work to become more generous than the day itself has been.
Yet cloth has taught me something I seem to forget with remarkable regularity.
It has never withheld tomorrow.
It has only ever offered today.
The rest is my own impatience.
I think of dye vats that are not yet ready.
Leaves that have not finished becoming colour.
Needles resting across folded linen because there is nothing honest to stitch just yet.
None of these are unfinished.
They are simply keeping company with their own season.
Perhaps we are invited to do the same.
There are days when the work offers abundance.
A cloth gathers itself almost without asking.
The thread seems to know where it wishes to go before my hands do.
There are other days when all I receive is permission to sit quietly beside a weathered fragment and learn its weave a little better.
I have begun to suspect those days are no less generous.
They simply ask less of my hands and more of my attention.
The monks I once watched walking barefoot through the villages near their temple accepted only what that morning placed into their bowls.
No storing tomorrow.
No asking for a little more.
Only enough.
I wonder if the Archives has been teaching me something similar all along.
Not to leave hungry.
Not to leave full.
Simply to leave having received what this particular day had quietly set before me.
Perhaps practice is nothing more mysterious than learning not to take more than the day offers.
Namasté
Joe
I have found myself in a similar place lately. I usually have a list of things I need to get done. But, I just couldn't get moving. So, I sat on my swing and noticed the trees blowing gently in the wind. I looked at the weeds without feeling guilty that I hadn't started weeding. I appreciated that after 5 years of reseeding I finally had grass in my backyard that the moles hadn't destroyed. I even told myself, "Enough!" I usually work very hard on keeping up. But yesterday. I just relaxed and enjoyed the peace. And, it was enough.
Enough is a concept that seems to be alien to most humans. Particularly Americans. It seems to me that we always want to take things one step farther. Is it ingrained or learned?