With The Ideal Comes The Actual

"With the ideal comes the actual, like a box
All with its lid. Lo! with the ideal comes
The actual, like two arrows in mid-air
That meet."

These are lines from a Zen poem called "The Sandokai" which I think translates as the harmonization of sameness and differences. I was emailing with my friend the Buddhist monastic and telling her the story of my life as a home renovator. Her helpful and insightful reply was "With the ideal comes the actual".

The ideal exists in our imagination and the actual is what comes to our doorstep. We have a vision of how things should be (usually involving easy and pleasant) and then when other things happen we protest like toddlers who have had their favourite toy taken away.

"With the ideal comes the actual." This is so true of all things we regard as difficult in life. I think by regarding things as difficult, a subtle rejection of things as they are is implied. By regarding things as difficult, we imply that things should be easier, work out more smoothly and more to our liking. For me I always seem to imagine that things work out more smoothly for others. Somewhere deep inside I have bought some kind of advert image of people. If they look well put together, I imagine there lives flow seamlessly along like some silly hollywood movie. It's only when I get some snippet of their more private life that I wake up. I learn that they suffer from insomnia or their husband died of cancer or.....

So life as a home renovator has had its moments of lightness and darkness. More Sandokai here:
"Within all light
Is darkness, but explained it cannot be
By darkness that one-sided is alone.
In darkness there is light, but here again
By light one-sided it is not explained.
Light goes with darkness as the sequence does
Of steps in walking."

The lightness was in creating the vision and sourcing all the elements of the project and in appreciating the work of some of the great trades we had working on the project, the tilers, the carpenter. There was delight in seeing things come together and match as planned. But the darkness crept in when one trade proved unreliable, two proved over priced. The washing machine and the dishwasher got damaged in the move. Unexpected mold was discovered behind a cabinet. And the number one (as David Letterman would say) disappointment was the offgassing from the new cabinets and the smells of adhesives and grout used in the process. I had completely overlooked this aspect of the reno but the aspect had not overlooked me.

Chemical sensitivies to these products reared their ugly head and my body complained about the presence of these fumes. A cold turned to laryngitis, eyes burned and watered. And as the mind sometimes does, a great long story sprung, fully formed. "What if I have to rip my new kitchen out, what if I have to move?" I have been rediscovering the panic queen side of myself! In the end I did what any sane modern person would do. I googled it. I found that mobile homes have huge air quality and offgassing issues and that heavy duty air purifiers are used to suck the chemical gases from the air. So ensued a solution, an industrial strength air purifier.

I almost have my voice back and the project is almost complete. There has been lots of Dharma here, lots to learn and now the the appreciation of silence and solitude.

From The Shadows

This little 8x10 was an experiment (isn't all art?). I love creating textured and layered backgrounds, scratching and rubbing and working the paint. So after the layers of brown and green and yellow had gone on and dried I sat down in front of the canvas and closed my eyes. When I opened them, images suggested themselves from the background: first the moon and then the reflected moon, then the Buddha in the foreground. I closed my eyes and looked back again. And so on and so on until I had a host of shadowy figures. I thought of how sculptors talk about looking at a piece of stone until the form makes itself known and then their work is to release it.

This is a darker, more ethereal work than usual and in a strange way it painted itself. The process was a further exploration of trust and faith that I talked about several posts back; trusting that if we wait and listen something will come. It might not be what we expected, but something authentic will make itself known. ( Trust is also a focus for August over at Donna Iona Drozda's blog).

In our (my) usual rush to fill up the uncomfortable void where we don't know what's next, I generally trod over this delicate part of myself, me of skeptical self, of unexplored trust. So there was a slightly uncomfortable relationship with both the creating and with this dark, shadowy image that emerged, but there it is. I suspended judgment and called it done.

I have been enjoying the post retreat posts (does that make sense?) over at 108zenbooks, ones asking us to dig a little deeper, asking questions like what life sentences have we given ourselves. How do we hold ourselves hostage by the stories we tell ourselves or the ones we have accepted that were told to us by others? We create the self as a solid entity, almost by accident. For the most part we forget to tell ourselves the story of our Buddha nature, of our kind, generous, talented and wise inclinations.

And so this little painting reminds me that the shadow is the necessary accompaniment to light. It is always there even when we don't notice it. If we pay enough attention and suspend denial we might learn something.

All this talk of darkness and light makes me think of The Sandokai by Sekito Kisen recited in Zen monasteries. Here is a small portion of the poem relating to light & dark: May it shed some light.

Within light there is darkness, but do not try to understand that darkness;

Within darkness there is light, but do not look for that light.

Light and darkness are a pair, like the foot before

and the foot behind, in walking. Each thing has its own intrinsic value

and is related to everything else in function and position.