I’ve been beavering away on my son’s website, taking what was and stripping the old away to make way for a totally new, clean and improved, simple-y fabulous look. Another couple weeks, perhaps a tad more, and it will be up again, but not at all the same.

Isn’t that a wonderful metaphor for life, for the way we are always being redrawn, reimagined, renewed.

Scott and I went through an experience with what I can only call a scam company. While they provided us with a website — after pulling teeth for way too long — the site itself was sub-subpar. All the things they said couldn’t be done, I have now found can be.

Basically, I have taken the rudimentary bones of the site and boiled them clean, all thanks to my dear old friend and my new tech teacher. If only I would have connected those dots a year and a half ago.

Isn’t that the case — those ‘if onlys’.  If only is such a waste of time and energy. As Scott said, well, it seems we needed that experience for some reason. My response: whether there was a reason or not, it’s what we had, but not where we are now.

I’m finding that, rather than being a pain in the ass, the process of putting up all the product variations is rather meditative. I’ve been working three to five hours a day for the past ten days and in the past putting that much time in wouldn’t have been so effortless.

It’s funny how simple and easy life can be — regardless of what I’m doing — when I don’t mind what I’m doing. It brings to mind the old saying: Chop wood; carry water. A ways back, I didn’t understand it even though I thought I did. I didn’t realize that it meant do what you are doing and nothing else. If you’re chopping wood, chop it. If you are carrying water, carry it and don’t be chopping wood thinking about the water you’re going to have to carry when you’re done with the wood pile. Or in my case, when I am working at the computer, work at the computer.

The old tendency would have been to sit at the computer, pissed that I had to be sitting at the computer all day, irritated at the scammers that didn’t do their job and probably never intended to, and all that anger would have been flowing into the artistry of the website’s expression.

That’s why I stripped the site. All the energy of the people I had argued with, that I had been frustrated with, was embedded in the site. When I slowed way down, I could feel it. When I paid attention, it was inescapable.

Chop wood; carry water is easy, effortless when you see what you’ve been doing, when you realize that you’ve been carrying a pail of water on your back while you chopped the wood. Seeing the futility, the added weight, the stupidity, the lack of awareness, allows the pure doing to take over.

Life is the pure doingness, the pure beingness. We just muck it up by letting our mind’s eye hold sway. It’s always the same solution, always, all ways. Be with what is — mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually — notice the thoughts, feel the energy in the body and the emotional charge, be aware of the container, the awareness in which it all arises — and from that gentle pause, follow the breadcrumbs that life is always laying in your path. 

Everything in life brings us back to the pause, the recognition of what is, the simple now-here, back to our ordinarily sacred, extraordinarily mundane, direct experience.