Be okay with your mess said my yoga teacher as I sprayed cleaner on the floor of my kitchen during class.
That was over a month ago.
I am in a mess; I have a mess; things are a mess. Chaos. A word that comes to us from the Greek khaos, "abyss, that which gapes wide open, that which is vast and empty.”
A void. Dark or light, that seems to depend on you. Reports from people who regularly surf chaos are varied.
I’ve been thinking about water and trust and how inside your home both need to run in vertical lines. These lines are influenced by diachronic constraints, like a ten year marriage built in a home with 96 year old plumbing.
The lines can turn together but it better be specific and clear.
Unless you want your heartwalls bleeding with misdirected water.
I took some time off so that men who understand how to run water in straight lines indoors could tear my house apart. It’s the biggest project we’ve ever done and it’s happening during a pandemic which is totally good, completely fine, folks everything is cool-cool-cool.
It’s not optimal except maybe it also is. That’s the thing about water, about trust, maybe it’s always happening exactly as it should, a constant flow state that teaches, guides, carves out a riverbed showing the way. Both encourage self reflection. Like maybe next time you will watch out for the giant rock, not dive head first, perhaps consider wearing a goddamn life jacket, tell the truth, get consent.
The morning they started the owner of the plumbing company showed me where the plumbers would build an actual water shut off point downstairs in the basement because 96 years ago they didn't make one. As he was talking he got quiet. He turned on his flashlight. He touched the old pipe very gently with the edge of his finger and rubbed it on his thumb.
Interesting, he said.
Oh no, I said. Interesting literally means to be between. Is that water on the outside of the pipe?
Yes, he said.
In my head I thought, but what do you even expect? That things last forever? 96 years is a long fucking time. Think how many people have stood in your kitchen, turned on the tap and trusted clean water would pour out. For almost a century this piped water has washed hands, filled pots, cleaned rags. What business do you have hoping that will always be the case? Don’t trust what isn’t real.
Everything you do is built and maintained at the speed of trust.
It took us nine years to save for a repipe. Being a grown up is weird. Time goes faster and slower than you think it will. Things take longer. You also become a tired mammal. You want to crawl into bed and hope your 96 year old pipes will last another night rather than pay thousands of dollars to not have water for a week.
As my teacher says you can always hope. Hope is free.
Hope is a word that comes to us from the Old English hopian. It carries a specific historical sense of trust in God’s word, in the promise of mercy. God’s promise of salvation: do not be afraid tiny mammals I got you but like probably only if you make sure to do a really good job on this here inhabitable rock spinning through the void.
Like so many things mercy can just happen but most people have work for it. Trust is the prerequisite for mercy. You have to believe something is real before you can really work for it anyway. You can work for things you don’t believe in, that you don’t trust, but why would you?
Out of curiosity, if you did, would you expect good results?
We didn’t have plumbers come to our house and make lines that they didn’t believe in. They did their absolute best and you could see it. They sawed deep into the walls and pulled out ancient metal houseguts. I marveled over the brand new bright gleaming copper attachments and how they looked like jewels in the early morning light, glowing in the dust and debris.
There is absolutely no way they could have done their jobs online via Zoom. It’s totally cool if you can do your job online via Zoom. For example I can. I can and it’s a privilege that I am grateful for every single day because COVID is real and it is scary.
But plumbers can’t use the internet to fix your pipes. They have to show up, on your doorstep, ready to navigate this new normal. I have to trust them and they have to trust me and that is the only way for some people to do their vital work right now.
Or was trust always the way of it and I just forgot? Or did I make the mistake of thinking I was all alone in this?
You are not alone in this. I am not alone in this.
You can feel uncomfortable about the complexities but that doesn’t change them. There is no plumb line here dictating right and wrong sides. The complexities are real. They are the void, the chaos, the mess.
The truth is that we are all in this together. Really. We are only free when we are all free. Our collective liberation lies in our togetherness and will be built at the speed of trust.
Some things you have to believe in enough to show up for. Your work is one of them. Trust it.